Empire and Identity

Vera06 DREAMS OF AVARICE

Imperial Ambitions

Empire & IdentityWAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

32 SEARCHING FOR SHADOWSThe Multiplicity of Meaning 50 DARKENED UPLANDS

Recurring Nightmares

CAPTIONFEBRUARY 2016 | veramag.co.uk | 1

VERAIssue No. #1

“Empire & Identity”February 2016

Cover Art Toby ElwesInside Art Aurelius Noble

Contributors:

EditorAurelius Noble

Assistant EditorsArthur Scott-Geddes

Eleanor ChambersJoshua Alston

ArtistsToby Elwes

ContributorsArthur Scott-GeddesAurelius NobleEleanor ChambersJoshua AlstonMeg Dyson

To contribute to Vera magazine please contact: [email protected]

2 | veramag.co.uk | FEBRUARY 2016

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first edition of Vera magazine, over the next few months we aim to provide an affable forum for the discussion of the arts and humani-ties; with topics ranging from history, politics and philosophy, to literature, art and film. Attending to relevant and important issues, we hope to provide undergraduates with an opportunity to discuss these issues and bring new, fresh perspectives to them.

The theme of this issue, albeit tenuous at times, is that of Empire and Iden-tity, with a variety of articles ranging from descriptive to polemic. These articles discuss reconciliation with empire and post-colonial identity, both as a response to transgressions in the past and as the result of post-modern morality. Furthermore, beyond responding to historical imperialism, some articles offer a critique of the more subtle forms of imperialism still present today, tracing historical commonalties to show the dangers that lie ahead and the continued costs inflicted by imperialism.

In the first section, Dreams of Avarice, we trace the rise and fall of a variety of empires as they struggled with grandiose ambitions. There is a common thread among these articles surrounding the folly of these ambitions and the inevitable failings of imperial ideology and consequent reconciliation with a troubled past. Searching for Shadows is a far more broad-reaching section, exploring issues of identity and subjective reality, it details notions of morality in a post-colonial world and underlines the importance of de-nouncing constructed truths and objective realities or identities. Charting a decline in meaning, yet the simultaneous importance of not succumbing to singular interpretations, this section poses questions we are, unfortunate-ly, incapable of answering; but that are hopefully interesting nonetheless. Finally, Darkened Uplands deals with the continuation of imperialism to the present day, examining the ways in which countries and multi-national cor-porations continue to use their power exploitatively. Offering a dark picture of post-WWII imperialistic practices, it suggests that our dreams of empire remain dangerously unfinished.

-AureliusEditor

EDITOR’S NOTE

Contents

07Topic

Dreams of Avarice

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7 / AN EMPIRE IN ECLIPSEThe tale of triumph and trauma in Japan, as it con-tested Western dominance in East Asia.

27 / THE LIMITS OF EMPIREThe Golden Age of the Roman Empire and the dangers of a militaristic imperial ideology.

15 / A WANING MOONThe use of economic coer-cion by Western powers to cement the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

21 / THE CIVILISING MISSIONOrientalism and the transformation of India under the British East India Company.

Searching for Shadows

33 / A TWISTED FAIRYTALEThe subjectivity of intepre-tation, an analysis of Pan’s Labyrinth as a critique of fascist thought.

39 / BLANK SPACESAn examination of race and identity as a broader cri-tique of British colonialism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

43 / JACK’S SMIRKING REVENGENihilism in the light of meaningless consumerism; modernity and identity in David Fincher’s Fight Club.

Darkened Uplands

51 / THE LOST WARThe inevitability of failure in the war that no one won, nationalism and anti-coloni-alism in Vietnam.

57 / THERE WILL BE BLOOD The neo-colonial impact of the mining and oil indus-tries in a local and national context.

63 / LONE STAR STATEBloody civil war in Liberia - modern imperialism and the legacy of American attempts to limit the spread of Communism in Africa.

By successfully contesting Western hegemony for the first time the rise of the Japanese Empire represented a new era in Asian history, yet its rise was mired with traumas which Japan still struggles to reconcile with.


63

51

Dreams ofAvarice

AMBITION, ATROCITY AND THE PURSUIT OF POWER


As one of the first eastern states to industrialise, the tale of Japanese dealings with Empire, others and its own, is one of glory and tragedy. Reconcialiation with this troublesome past still plays a central role in regional politics and collective memory.

AN EMPIRE IN ECLIPSE

By Aurelius Noble

Off some distant shore, search-ing for the promise of a rising sun, four Black Ships rode atop white-capped waves, leaving a trail of steam - a promise of days yet to come. The arrival of Commodore Perry’s naval squadron in Edo Bay on the 8th July 1853 signalled the end of an era of isolation, eventu-ally resulting in the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate. While the Shogunate had previously engaged in limited trade relations with the Dutch, the spectre of the Opium War to the west and the American threat forced the Japanese into a series of ‘unequal treaties’, fer-menting political conflict between pro-imperial and Shogunate forces.

Though the Americans attempted to present themselves as a more peaceable, less militaristic force than those of the Europeans, there was a great degree of military co-ercion in the opening of Japan. As Perry made his way into Edo Bay he steamed past the lines of Japa-nese forces, aiming his guns upon

the town of Uraga and ordering the Japanese to enter into negotiations or face military repercussions. A compromise was reached on the 31st March 1854 with the Treaty of Kanagawa, which maintained prohibitions on trade, but allowed the Americans to base their ships in Shimoda and Hakodate. Thus began a period of rapid modernisa-tion, with the construction of new port defenses, the establishment of the Nagasaki Naval Training Centre and the acquisition of steam war-ships from the Dutch with the pur-chase of the Kankō Maru in 1855 as the Shogunate desperately tried to maintain military and political he-gemony.

These attempts were, inevitably, inadequate. While the Convention of Kanagawa had advanced Amer-ican aims, it was extremely limit-ed in its scope - as the Shogunate tried to balance pro-Western (kai-koku) and anti-Western (joi) forc-es. The Americans therefore sent a second delegation in 1858, led by Townsend Harris. Harris was far more demanding than Perry, using the reignition of the Opium Wars in October 1856 to emphasise the danger posed to the Japanese by European powers and their need to find a peaceable resolution. Ulti-mately the Japanese acquiesced to American demands, opening five ports to American trade and grant-ing them extraterritoriality. After

this reluctant acceptance of the Treaty of Amity and Commerce, Ja-pan shortly followed with the sign-ing of the Ansei Treaties with Great Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands.

Yet Japan’s troubles were hardly at an end, anti-foreign sentiment was on the rise, fermenting widespread dissent. Murders of foreigners and collaborators quickly followed the signing of the treaty. Indeed, the Japanese Prime Minister Li Nao-suke, who had signed the Harris Treaty and tried to eliminate an-ti-foreign sentiment with the Ansei Purge, was himself murdered in March 1860 in the Sakuradamon Incident. Thus began a period of acute conflict between shogunate and pro-imperial forces, with Em-peror Komei proclaiming his “order to expel barbarians” in March and April 1863, contrary to the com-mands of the Shogunate govern-ment.

While the Emperor had very little power, this order provided the op-portunity for anti-Shogunate forces to rally. In 1863 several clans be-gan actions to expel foreigners and the domains of Choshu and Sat-suma broke out into open revolt. As Western forces rallied behind the Shogunate government, with the shelling of rebel forces by the USS Wyoming in July 1863 and the Bombardment of Kagoshima by the

“The steam-powered shipsbreak the halcyon slumber

of the Pacific;a mere four boats are enough

to make us lose sleep at night.”

Unknown, 1853

Dreams of Avarice

British in August 1863, the rebel-lions worsened - with the eruption of the Mito rebellion on the 2nd May 1864 against the Shogunate in the name of expelling Western “barbarians” and restoring imperial rule. The Choshu Domain remained particularly troublesome through-out this period, attempting to seize Kyoto in the Kinmon Incident of the 20th August 1864. While all these rebellions were eventually put down and punished with puni-tive expeditions from the Tokuga-wa government and from Western nations, demonstrating the futility of attempting to expel far more ad-vanced western nations, they went far in illustrating the vast structural weaknesses of the Shogunate.

Indeed, as the Shogunate redou-bled its efforts to suppress dissent it became increasingly unable to cope with more modernised foes. In 1866, a punitive expedition against the Choshu ended in dis-aster, as the more disciplined and better equipped Choshu troops were able to defeat the larger Sho-gunate force. This defeat led to a drastic attempts at modernisation by the Shogunate, with massive expansion of western-style military education and large-scale import of French weaponry. However, ef-forts to stem this reversal would prove unsuccessful, with the death of Tokugawa Lemochi in 1866 and Emperor Komei in 1867 Japan was thrown once more into a period of instability. An allegiance between the Satsuma and Choshu in 1866 behind the newly anointed Emper-or Meiji led to the disestablishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate on the 9th November 1867 and the effec-tive restoration of imperial rule fol-lowing the Boshin War of 1868 to 1869.

Ultimately foreign intervention was largely responsible for the collapse of feudal-style rule in Japan, the succeeding Meiji Restoration was a period of hugely accelerated in-dustrialisation and modernisation. Indeed, it was only in 1868 that the Japanese government established the Tokyo Arsenal, beginning its manufacture of small arms and am-munition, this if anything signalled Japan’s determination to take its destiny back into its own hands. Over the next twenty years the gov-ernment institute vast programs of reform, introducing conscription in 1873 as an attempt to match the large standing-armies of the West. While these reforms were certainly met with resistance, not least from old social elites, Japan had begun to model itself on those states who had defeated it. In one fell-sweep Japan had not just transformed it-self into an imperial power, but an imperialist one.

Rise of the East

With the establishment of the new Meiji government and the ensuing period of modernisation, Japan found itself in a stronger position diplomatically. Thus, in 1871 the Iwakura Mission was sent to trav-el around the world and renego-tiate the ‘unequal treaties’ Japan had been forced into by Western powers. While the mission was ulti-mately unsuccessful, observations made about these western powers encouraged modernisation back home. Support for westernisation was widespread across society and provide a powerful force in the eco-nomic and military development of Japan, enabling it to become a ma-jor power in the east in just forty years.

This period of economic modern-isation was closely monitored and supported by the Meiji government who encouraged a very mercantil-ist economic structure. A series of reforms were undertaken, intro-ducing a unified currency as well as stock exchanges and new laws con-cerning banking, commerce and taxation. Thus, by the 1890s the establishment of a modern eco-nomic framework was largely com-plete, supporting a period of rapid growth.

As Japan underwent this period of rapid industrialisation and modern-isation, Japanese nationalism be-gan to take a more concrete form. In the 1870s and 1880s Japan be-gan its establishment and expan-sion of a colonial empire, with the seizure of the Bonin, Kurile and Ryukyu islands, in addition to using gunboat diplomacy to force Korea to sign a treaty in 1876 granting ex-traterritoriality and opening three trade ports. Even prior to the First World War, Japan became involved in a series of territorial disputes, the first of which was the First Si-no-Japanese War, which took place between China and Japan from 1894 to 1895. The war largely re-volved around the balance of Chi-nese and Japanese power in Korea, with the Japanese sending troops to Korea after they had requested Chinese troops to help quell a re-bellion. In 1895 the Treaty of Shi-monoseki was signed, ceding the Liaodong peninsula and Taiwan to Japan. This reflected the rapid pro-gress of the Japanese military and economy and brought it new levels of prestige while hugely damaging that of the Chinese and ferment-ing an anti-foreign sentiment that would ultimately result in the Boxer Rebellion and was largely respon-sible for the collapse of the Qing

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dynasty.

However, this would shortly incite conflict between Russia and Japan, increasing territorial tensions be-tween the nations. While the Trea-ty of Shimonoseki had promised Port Arthur, on the Liaodong Pen-insula, to the Japanese, this clause was overruled by Western Powers who granted the port to the Rus-sian Empire. The war began in 1904 with a surprise attack on the Rus-sian Eastern Fleet stationed in Port Arthur and the Russians suffered heavy losses. Furthermore, they were unable to reinforce the fleet, as the Russian Baltic Fleet was de-nied passage through the Suez Ca-nal by the British. The forces that were able to escape from Port Ar-thur were quickly defeated by the Imperial Navy at the Battle of the Yellow Sea and by the time the

Baltic Fleet arrived (a year later) it was unable to defeat the superior Japanese forces and was compre-hensively destroyed at the Battle of Tsushima. Likewise the ground war went rather poorly for the Russians, culminating in the Battle of Mukden on the 20th February 1905, where the Russians decisive-ly lost, with around 90,000 casual-ties. The defeat of both the Russian navy and army forced them to ne-gotiate a humiliating peace, culmi-nating in the Treaty of Portsmouth, in which the Russians ceded parts of Sakhalin Island, granted mineral rights in Manchuria and dropped any real opposition to Japan’s de-sire to annex Korea. As the first ma-jor military victory of a Asian power against a Western nation, this de-feat caused a great deal of shock around the world and cemented Japan’s new status as a major pow-

er. Even Eastern nations who had previous experience of Japanese aggression were encouraged by this victory, with Sun Yat-sen cit-ing this as a “defeat of the West by the East”, for the first time in cen-turies a certain regional pride was restored. Yet, despite these early signs of pan-Asian nationalism, the removal of Russian competition would prove detrimental to region-al stability and security, with rising tensions in Europe providing an ex-cellent distraction while Japan un-derwent territorial expansion.

With the outbreak of the First World War in Europe, Japan seized upon the opportunity to expand upon its colonial ambitions in east Asia, declaring war on Germany on the 23rd of August 1914. In coalition with British forces the Japanese quickly moved forwards,

Dreams of Avarice


seizing German territories in China and German New Guinea and forc-ing the German forces in east Asia to surrender on the 7th of Novem-ber 1915. While the war massively advanced Japanese colonial aims, with them retaining many of the German territories after signing a series of treaties in May 1915, Ja-pan’s alliance with western nations was tenuous at best. Indeed, after proposing a clause on racial equali-ty to become part of the charter of the newly formed League of Nations the Japanese found themselves in a position of enforced inferiority with the rejection of the clause by all major western nations. Thus began a period of increased Japanese ten-sions with Western powers, as they moved away from policies of coop-eration towards more nationalistic policies, ending the Anglo-Japa-nese Alliance in 1923.

Despite attempts to introduce dem-ocratic reforms by Prime Minister Kato Komei, these developments signalled the dawn of a new era of militarist, expansionist politics. As right-wing ideologies became more prevalent, especially under the in-fluence of Sadao Araki, founder of the Army Party, Japan saw a fusion between ancient bushido ideology and the more modern fascist ideals

seen in Europe. This manifested in a form of Emperor worship and a “new” Shinto, revolving around this nationalist ideals and culminating in a transformation of the state to serve the army and Emperor. These changes in short order led to open conflict, with the withdrawal of Ja-pan from the League of Nations in March 1933, following from wide-spread condemnation of Japanese involvement in the Manchurian Incident and the establishment of Manchukuo. While the Chinese government failed to oppose the action military, something that elic-ited much internal criticism, within the next four years China and Japan were once more brought into con-flict.

The history of the succeeding years is well documented, with the com-plete surrender of Japan follow-ing the tragedy of the two atomic bombs dropped upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945 respectively. The Manchurian region was seized by the Soviets within two weeks of the detonation and by the 15th of Au-gust 1945 Emperor Hirohito had of-ficially capitulated, with an official surrender signed on September 2nd 1945, signalling the end of the Second World War. The Japanese

forsook all their colonies and thus began a long period of rehabilita-tion and reconciliation.

In the Shadow of the Sun

With the occupation of Japan by Allied forces from 1945 to 1951 began a new era of pacifism and liberalisation. Central to this was the formation of a new postwar constitution under Allied super-vision, which included “Article 9”, renouncing warfare and banning Japan from maintaining any armed forces. While this constitution cer-tainly had foreign influence, it was also driven by internal attempts to avoid ever again rising to become an aggressive militaristic power. While the occupation was eventu-ally lifted as the Americans tried to meet the threat of Communism in Korea, it had a long-lasting impact and laid the foundation for mu-tual Japanese-American defence pacts; with the Japanese creating a Self-Defence Force at the behest of the US in 1954 to act as a bulwark against Chinese Communist expan-sion.

From 1947 onwards American pri-orities in Japan centered around economic regeneration and po-litical stability. Major economic

Dreams of Avarice

“The man on duty,Standing at the vessel’s helm,

Must watch not slumber,Though the winds in zephyrs blow,

And the waves lie calm below.”Emperor Meiji, 1872

restructuring and land reform deals were pushed through by the staff of General Douglas MacArthur in an attempt to build an economi-cally stronger Japan to counter the Soviet threat. The hostilities on the Korean peninsula would lead to even stronger trade ties between the two nations, with US payments worth twenty-seven percent of Ja-pan’s export trade given for “special procurement”. Thus began a period of rapid economic growth, culmi-nating in the 1950s and 1960s with the Japanese post-war economic miracle and by 1960 Japan was the world’s second largest economy. It was around this new industrialised, modern, pacifist centre that many parts of modern Japanese identity began to form.

Japan now began a long period of reconciliation with a troubled past, with various military tribunals tak-ing place to try Japanese war crim-inals. Many Japanese officials and officers were sentenced to death or imprisonment, and Japanese war crimes still remain a highly conten-tious issue in the region. Though the issues of biological warfare and ex-perimentation by Unit 731 in Man-churia, the treatment of prisoners of war, the Rape of Nanking and the keeping of so-called “comfort women” have at times been recog-nised by the Japanese government, explicit apologies have not always been forthcoming and education in particular remains a complex topic. These controversies are particularly clear in the lawsuit surrounding the textbook New Japanese History by Saburo Ienaga, which questioned public support for the war (and was resultantly rejected by the Ministry of Education), and around recent remarks about the extent of coer-cion involved in comfort women by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Dreams of Avarice

“Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps

changing directions. You

change direction but the sandstorm

chases you. You turn again, but the storm

adjusts. Over and over you play this

out, like some ominous dance with

death just before dawn.”

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, 2002


14 | veramag.co.uk | FEBRUARY 2016 Dreams of Avarice

The consequences of Japan’s post-war occupation and its fall from grace are still highly relevant to se-curity in the region, with anti-Jap-anese sentiment in China used to stoke up nationalist fervour in support of territorial claims in the East China Sea. Likewise, Japan’s re-lationship with America in balanc-ing the Chinese threat still remains pertinent, the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the US and China maintaining a strong military link between the two nations, with a continued US military presence of around 50,000 men in Japan. Indeed, Article 9, originally encouraged by the US to stop Japan returning to its militaris-tic ways, now faces much pressure for amendment both from right-

wing parties within Japan and from Japan’s American allies.

While Japan is by no means the imperial power it once was it still struggles to confront its past and find its role in the world. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 was cata-strophic for the Japanese economy and ever since Japan has found it harder still to consolidate its iden-tity, with the notion of a modern economic great power struggling to fully supplant earlier notions of the necessity of military, hard-pow-er in cementing international sta-tus. Issues which had for so long laid dormant, once more rise to the fore as Shinzo Abe has sought to normalise Japanese defence policy. The trauma felt by Japan can per-

haps best be summed up by the Yasukuni shrine, dating back to the 1890s and dedicated to Japan’s war dead. Enshrined here are Japan’s heroes and its monsters, with the bodies of fourteen indicted war criminals. Yet visits by conservative, nationalist politicians have been on the rise, inciting not only regional tensions, but also internal pacifist sentiment. Thus the tale of Japan is that of a nation in the shadow of the sun, unable to escape the trau-ma of its imperial past or to form a identity entirely anew, it is a na-tion of inescapable complexity and beauty grappling with a highly con-tested history.


The imperialist machinations of capitalism - how a banking crisis precipitated the collapse of the Ottoman state and the use of economic coercion in lieu of military force.

A WANING MOON

By Joshua Alston

From 1876 to 1878 the Ottoman Empire found itself in a crisis which signalled a turning point for imperi-alism in the Middle East. This crisis primarily arose from of a public debt crisis, ensuing in 1876, which in turn led to the bankruptcy of the Empire and its defeat in wars against Russia and Austria Hungary between 1876 and 1878. The effects of this crisis were far-reaching: it precipitated a political crisis which resulted in a brief constitutional revolution and the execution of the Sultan, caus-ing the loss of control over Bosnia, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania in addition to the loss of much of the machinery of the state (previously improved by the Tazimat reforms) which was used to benefit its cred-itors. Furthermore, the Ottoman state gradual lost autonomy over law-making, particularly in terms of the regulation of business and Eu-ropean Christian minorities - while the economy was shaped to the benefit of outside imperial powers.

Behind these crises are some of the most potent strategies used in building empires: economic pres-sure, military force and the use of divide and rule.

The State of Affairs

The Ottoman Empire had been the preeminent power in the Middle East and South Eastern Europe for more than 350 years, since the de-struction of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1517. At its height it ruled over a region which spanned from Mo-rocco in the West to the borders of Iran in the East, and from the gates of Vienna to Yemen in the South. Ottoman government was split into the Vizierate, responsi-ble for the primary administrative tasks of the government and the Caliphate, which was the ultimate political and spiritual arbiter. In the provinces, it was ruled by Pashas, provincial governors with varying levels of autonomy. Traditionally,

the key source of revenue for the Ottoman state, was the Jizya tax, levied on non-Muslim’s living in the Ottoman Empire, taxes collected by the provincial elite, and customs on the great overland trade routes be-tween the Europe and the Far East. It was a largely agrarian economy, with the majority of the population working as subsistence peasant farmers.

By the mid-19th Century, the Ot-toman Empire did not inspire the fear it once had on Christian Eu-ropean powers. It was described as the ‘sick man of Europe’, losing territory to nationalist movements, with Serbia gaining independence in 1804 and Greece in 1821. Their army was weaker than that of Eu-ropean powers, losing wars with Russia from 1768 to 1774, 1806 to 1812 and 1853 to 1856. It strug-gled to compete economically with the industrialised and centralised states of Western Europe. This trig-

Dreams of Avarice

“If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”

Vladimir Lenin, 1916

-gered a series of Western Europe-an inspired reforms to government and society, including the settle-ment and taxing of nomadic groups in Syria, the abolition of tax farming and its replacement by profession-al tax collectors, the opening of the Ottoman market to imports from Western Europe and the creation of a new professional army to replace the conscripted Janissary corps. These reforms vastly increased the power of the previously distant Ot-toman state, its ability to generate revenue and control its provinces, but they also left it open to malign economic influences from outside the Empire.

Economic Imperialism

The Ottoman public debt crisis represented the culmination of a pattern of exchanging industrially produced goods for Ottoman debt, a pattern similar to the develop-ment of the British Raj in India or British control over Egypt (which had split from the Ottoman Em-pire in the 1830s). The British and French ownership of Ottoman debt partially resulted from the inflation and devaluation of the previously strong Ottoman currency, which was the result of the import of cheap precious metals from their Atlantic Empires.

Inflation was sufficiently rampant in the mid-19th century that in 1862 they were forced to issue paper money for the first time, although this reform had little impact out-side of Istanbul. Another key factor influencing Anglo-French control over the Ottoman debt was Otto-man dependence on Western Eu-ropean industrial produce, particu-larly in terms of the export of arms and ships. Likewise the expense of the ongoing reform programs was a

crucial factor, this introduced a new and more expensive army and bu-reaucracy, which did not immedi-ately produce a sufficiently greater revenue for the state to be able to pay off its debts. The formation of the Ottoman Public Debt Adminis-tration, a body controlled by Britain and France to administer the econ-omy of the Ottoman Empire can be seen as the result of a process of undermining the Ottoman econo-my through the purchase of Otto-man debt and the undermining of the Ottoman Economy.

The Ottoman public debt crisis fits very much with Lenin’s idea of im-perialism as the ‘monopoly stage of capitalism’, with Britain and France, through the export of cap-ital, gaining a monopoly over the functioning of the Ottoman state. It allowed them to control the major revenue sources of the Ottoman state, such as the salt monopoly, and gave them some control over taxation. Furthermore it allowed them to control and invest in the major overland trade routes run-ning through the Ottoman Empire to India and the far-East. It limited the expenditure of the Ottoman state on the types of development which would most help the extrac-tion of resources, for example the development of railways and ports.

Like much of the colonised world the Ottoman economy was re-designed to face outwards, with American, British, German, French and Russian companies given con-cessions to do business within the Ottoman Empire. The main indus-try in the Ottoman Empire was to-bacco, which was largely exported to Western Europe. Particularly outside of Anatolia the Ottoman Empire was a much reduced force, struggling on in a semi-colonial

state until its final collapse in 1921.

Balkan Nationalism

From 1876 to 1878 the Ottoman Empire was at war over its Balkan kingdoms, losing control of Bos-nia, Romania, Bulgaria and Alba-nia to Russia, Austria Hungary or self-government under the influ-ence of varied foreign powers. This deprived the Ottoman Empire of some of the most important areas of its Empire. The Balkans were the traditional source of the Ottoman army, as prior to the 1826 Muslims could not be conscripted.

As the army was islamised during the Tazimat reforms, the Ottoman Empire benefitted financially from the baddal-askar, a tax paid by non-Muslim’s to excuse themselves from conscription. It was one of the most densely populated and regulated areas of the Empire and therefore tax was easiest to collect. Territory in the Balkans was seen by the Ottomans as a measure of the success of the Ottoman state, with the height of the Ottoman Empire seen as being during the Siege of Vienna under Suleiman the Magnif-icent in 1529. The independence or annexation of the vast majority of the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan terri-tory represented a great practical and cultural loss for the Ottoman Empire, further weakening it in the

Dreams of Avarice

“All subjects of the empire are called Ottomans, without

distinction whatever faith they profess; the status of an Ottoman is acquired and lost according to conditions speci-

fied by law.”Ottoman Constitution, 1876



face of the other Great Powers.

The ideological appeal of Europe was a key force in the collapse of Ottoman power in the Balkans. This can be described as a policy of di-vide and rule, largely implemented by the Russian’s on the Ottoman European frontier. They hoped to utilise their common Christian Slavic identity with the European elements of the Ottoman Empire in order to establish client king-doms in Eastern Europe. This was to the benefit of local elites, who could use the assertion of a Slavic, a Romanian or a Bulgarian national

identity to build a power base for themselves, as the liberators and unchallenged rulers of their nation, rather than under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. This can be seen through the enthusiasm of the Romanian royal family in agitating and mobilising for their independence. The mobilisation of local, ethnic identities by imperial powers against the current govern-ment or in support of an imperial power was another key feature of many imperial ventures, used by European powers in almost all of their colonies.

The collapse of the European el-ements of the Ottoman Empire as a result of war with Russia and Austria served to confirm Euro-pean supremacy. The failure of the Ottoman army in the 1876 to 1878 was partly based on the dire financial situation of the Ottoman state, which limited its ability to raise sufficient troops to be able to adequately resist the combined forces of the Russians and the Aus-tro-Hungarians. Logistical issues, such as the difficulty faced in fight-ing surrounded by a largely hos-tile population and problems with moving troops and weaponry to

Dreams of Avarice

“Never a trace or

sign of springtide’s

beauty doth

remain; Fallen

amidst the garden lie the leaves,

now all their glory

vain.”Baqi, c. 1600

the front contributed to the loss of the war. The failure of the Ottoman Empire to compete militarily with the other Great Powers allowed them greater control over Ottoman policy, as they could use the threat of bringing more war and destruc-tion to the Empire as a mechanism for extracting concessions. Aside from the territorial concessions in the Balkans and in Armenia, this influence was primarily used to extract the opening of the Darda-nelles Straits to all ships, negating the strategic situation of Istanbul. Defeat in 1878 marked the use of overt military imperialism on the Ottoman Empire, a third major technique of imperial exploitation.

Ottoman Responses

The 1876 Revolution was conduct-ed by a group known as the Young Ottoman’s, largely drawn from the ranks of the Ottoman Empire’s new bureaucracy; aimed at providing solutions to the crisis of legitimacy faced by the Ottoman state. This crisis was one which can be traced back to the beginnings of the Tazi-mat reforms. The reforms led to the gradual increase of the state’s con-trol over the lives of the Ottoman public without a concerted attempt to provide new justifications for this control. The perceived lack of legiti-macy suffered by the Ottoman state was compounded by the increasing European financial influence on the Ottoman Empire, which allowed left the Ottoman state as a weak pawn of Britain and France. The Young Ottoman’s saw their program as an attempt to reclaim power from Eu-rope, and reclaim the lost legitima-cy of the Ottoman state.

The Young Ottoman’s believed, like the Tazimat reformers before them, that the only way to create

a strong, independent and legiti-mate Ottoman state was to imitate the successful practices of West-ern Europe. They were secularists and westernisers, who dreamed of creating a new Ottoman na-tion, along the lines of Britain and France. Significant within this was the Ottoman constitution, intro-duced by Sultan Abdulhamid II after the execution of his predecessor, which saw the establishment of a parliament which served to limit the authority of the Caliphate. They saw the Ottoman constitution as a way of creating a class of citizens of the Ottoman nation, rather than as a subjects to the Ottoman state. Their adoption of explicitly European ideas in the constitution (adapt-ed from the Belgian constitution) the ideological effect of imperial-ism, causing the Ottoman Empire to seek to imitate the European state.

The Ottoman crisis of 1876 to 1878 marks a turning point in the rela-tions between the Ottoman Empire and the West. The Ottoman Empire had previously been considered a Great Power, a force to be reckoned with in Europe. During this period they lost control of their state and their ability to act independently of other Great Powers. It signals the change between the older more decentralised Empires such as the Ottoman Empire and the newer Western European imperialism which would define the modern world. This crisis displays the pa-rameters of the European imperial-ism, the military, the economic and political forms of control, and how Ottoman policy was controlled by outside. The crisis shows how the Ottoman Empire fell victim to the imperialism of a group of compet-ing Imperial powers, and their eco-nomic and political control.



While the East India Company played a prominent role in the shaping of modern India in many ways its impact was shaped by notions of cultural superiority as well as political and economic pragmatism.

THE CIVILISING MISSION

By Eleanor Chambers

‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves’… From the beginning of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the Brit-ish East India Company underwent a drastic transformation, from a small group of merchant traders, into a powerful agent of British im-perialism in India. The Company’s increasingly aggressive and imperi-alistic policies were further acceler-ated by the existing Mughal empire falling into decline throughout the eighteenth century. They reached the peak of power and authority before the mutiny of 1857 where the Company was finally deprived of both political and commercial control, replaced instead by the British Government.

On December 31st, in the year 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to a small Company of Merchants to travel to the East Indies. This gave them a monop-oly for 15 years over trade to the East, and their first voyage as the East India Company departed from England in 1601. The nature of the Company business was a fairly radical one. Rather than a family partnership, this was a joint-stock company that could issue tradable shares on the market to any num-ber of investors: a mechanism ca-pable of achieving greater capital. Within a decade, they had success-fully set up their first trading port in India by means of a factory at Surat

in the Bay of Bengal. Significantly, this gave the Company access to spice which was not controlled by Dutch traders, a problem they had encountered in the other so-called ‘Spice-Islands’. This was further se-cured by the first official treaty with Mughal Emperor Nurudin Salim Ja-hangir in 1615, giving the Company exclusive rights to continue to re-side and build factories in Surat in exchange for European commodi-ties. Their base was now complete-ly protected for trade operations and competition with Dutch or Por-tuguese merchants.

From here on, the East India Com-pany experienced a dramatic in-crease in trade, power and influ-ence. By 1668, the Company had established factories in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, and the build-ing of Fort William in 1696 brought Calcutta to the fore as a prominent trading town by the turn of the cen-tury. The success of textile trading in particular was such that, in 1697, London weavers, dyers and linen drapers attacked the domestic East India House, protesting that Asian imports were threatening their own industries. Despite an initial ban, market forces overshadowed the cries of the protestors, and In-dian cloth and calicoes continued to be hugely popular in Britain. The rise in luxury goods and consumer goods for the new middling classes proved to be a rapidly expanding

market, and the Company reaped the benefits.

It was not until the eighteenth cen-tury that there was a real shift in Company fortunes. Through the course of the century, the Compa-ny transformed from a mere trad-ing group, albeit a successful one, to an organisation with real po-litical power in areas of India and an expanding empire. The years between 1720 and 1755 were, generally speaking, periods of un-precedented calm and stability in terms of the economic and politi-cal atmospheres, but this stability in Company affairs was not to be repeated. In 1757 Robert Clive, Commander-in-Chief in British In-dia, achieved victory at the infa-mous Battle of Plassey, in which he fought against the weakening Mughal Empire and recaptured Calcutta from the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj-ud-Daulah. This was, howev-er, arguably won through treach-ery, forged contracts and bribes between bankers rather than by military prestige. The loot extract-ed from Bengal put roughly £2.5 million into the Company treasury, and a further £234,000 in Clive’s pockets, making him the richest self-made man in Britain. With new economic security, a further battle was fought at Buxar in 1764, which resulted in what was later named by British officials the ‘Treaty of Allahabad’. The Mughal Emperor

Dreams of Avarice

Shah Alam was exiled from Delhi and forced into an agreement with the Company, effectively forcing a privatisation. By its terms, the Company received the diwani for the Bengal region: revenue collect-ing rights in one of India’s richest provinces. Robert Clive became the new Governor of Bengal, and it was at this moment that the East India Company ceased to be a group of spice and silk traders, and became owners of the foundations of an Indian Empire. This transition from trade expansion to military prow-ess and thus territorial expansion was a turning point for the East In-dia Company, and one from which they could not go back. Within a few years, the Company had locally recruited 20,000 soldiers and had cemented themselves as the ef-fective rulers of Bengal, becoming an increasingly aggressive colonial power. The Company management of the region also resulted in the great Bengal Famine of 1769-70 during which nearly a third of the population starved to death.

Indeed, The effects of imperialism were felt in Britain too. Domestic anxieties and fears over the expand-ing Empire in India had been grow-

ing, and these were directly inter-linked with worries about societal shifts and class-hopping that had arisen as a result of fortunes made by ‘new’ men working for the Com-pany. The term ‘nabob’ was created as a satirical and derogatory term for returning Company men who had acquired huge sums of money and riches during their time in In-dia. They were seen as lavish and vulgar, and were depicted in media and contemporary literature with hilarity and hostility. Domestic con-cerns over their political influences and acquired prestige of these men were widespread, (an estate was needed for a parliamentary seat, and many ‘nabobs’ bought estates on their return to Britain), and de-spite Company members in par-liament never forming a ‘bloc’ or lobbying as a united group, these fears did not diminish. This perhaps explains why almost a century lat-er, the impeachment and trial in-vestigating Company corruption of Warren Hastings in 1773, the Gov-ernor General of India, enjoyed so much media attention and public vilification. Nabobs were targets for domestic observers, as the vehi-cle through which they could voice their concerns and anxieties about

Britain’s new position forming an Empire in India. It was less the nabob himself, but what he epito-mised, that troubled British observ-ers. Vilification of the nabob was arguably a form of colonial self-ex-amination, and worries arose over the perceived permeable nature of the frontier between Britain and India — their material goods and orientally-styled lifestyle fed fears of a wave of Indian imperialism en-croaching upon Britain. The goods they returned with forced domestic audiences to come to terms with the material reality of an expand-ing Indian Empire. Social, political and economic domestic fears were often scapegoated upon the na-bobs, and nabobish culture looked down upon by those born into the upper echelons of society. The na-bob encapsulated the concern that the growing Empire in India might leave a footprint in Britain, and change what it meant to be quin-tessentially British.

The moral crisis of the eighteenth century, otherwise known as the ‘India question’, was epitomised by concerns about what the prop-er relationship should be between Britain and India. Specifically, there

Dreams of Avarice

“Empire always overreaches itself and thus dies by its own

hand, victim of its own ambition.”

Rasool Jibraeel Synman



were widespread fears about the effect an Empire based on conquest would have on Britain, for instance worries that corruption and arbi-trary government may be passed to Company servants, acting as cor-rosive agents on Britain. Cases pub-licised in the British media, such as that of Warren Hastings and Robert Clive, were seen as evidence of the damaging nature the East had upon Britons. Parallel to this, humanitar-ian anxieties about the treatment of Indian natives by the Company discussed fears that conquest bred contempt for Indians and their civ-ilisation. It is important to remem-ber, however, that whilst question-ing what their proper role in India should be, the British did not resign their power, but instead the nation made ideological and political ad-justments to justify its rule in India. This, of course, resulted in its justi-fication primarily of acting as a civ-ilising mission. Thus, although the concerns triggered by nabobs led

to ideas about imperial responsi-bility, the reaction, certainly by the late 1700s, was that the ‘appropri-ate goal’ for the British was to rule and ‘civilise’ India.

The justification of imperialism with the civilising mission was arguably also carried out by evangelical and other missionary organisations, who were finally allowed into Brit-ish India in 1813, by which time Brit-ish rule was much more stable and secure. Missionary organs tended to emphasise the plight of Indian women, but rarely against the Brit-ish oppressor. The umbrella-term ‘Hinduism’ was the common en-emy of the missionaries, and they worked tirelessly to spread the message of God amongst the Indi-an populace. However, whether the missionaries cause was simply reli-gious, or just imperialism by other means, was strongly debated. Their Christian message contained strong elements of a Westernised culture,

and the schools and colleges they founded all encompassed strong British values and cultural princi-ples. Despite the provoking argu-ment for their imperialistic mission, in reality the missionaries were ac-tually very isolated from East India Company workings. Company of-ficials and their families tended to stay away from missionaries, who were seen by many at the time as “small detachments of maniacs”. The Company made very sure to es-tablish its work in India as separate to the work of missionary organs, and it is arguable that where Com-pany campaigns were driven by au-thority, power and fiscal strategy, missionary campaigns were more convincingly based upon moral rea-soning . An example of this is the case of sati, the act of burning a widow on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. This supposedly vol-untary immolation by the widow was strong protested against by the Company and missionary groups,

Dreams of Avarice

until it was finally abolished in 1829. It would not be unfounded to claim that the main desire for its abolition was based upon gaining a higher level of control and author-ity over the country, and by crim-inalising this act, it paved the way for more British acts to be passed which too infringed upon Indian traditions or religious practices. For missionary protestors in the lead up to the abolition, however, their condemnations of sati were seem-ingly based purely on the moral and religious wrongs that this act caused, and driven by concern for the welfare of the widow, as in some cases it seemed highly un-likely that sati was truly a voluntary act. This elucidates how Company imperialism differed from mission-ary involvement in India. Although both groups ultimately were im-perialistic, where the Company was obviously and deliberately so, missionaries’ imperialistic qualities were more indirect.

The legacy of the East India Com-pany can still be seen today in the flourishing old college buildings, copious cricket matches and the Great Indian Railways. However, while this denotes the supposed benefits of the “civilising mission” there is a tangible veneer: but be-hind this façade remain the less ap-pealing truths, an almost uninten-tional form of cultural imperialism that eventually manifested itself politically. The British railways, built only a decade after conception in Britain, existed purely to transport Company goods, exploiting local labour and resources. Despite the self-justification for the Indian em-pire, imperialism remains one of the less-edifying moments in Brit-ish collective consciousness that we would rather not remember.


“Every Empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other Empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate” Edward W. Said


As it reached its climax the Roman Empire found itself in an ever more untenable position, with territorial expansion driven by an imperial ideology that placed military prestige above pragmatic considerations.

THE LIMITS OF EMPIRE

By Aurelius Noble

With the significant expansion of the Roman Empire during the sec-ond century CE, firstly under Trajan (r. 98-117CE) and then continued to a lesser extent under Marcus Au-relius (r. 161-180CE) and Septimius Severus (r. 193-211CE), the Empire gradually required more resourc-es to support it. In some ways this territorial expansion forwarded Ro-man strategic aims, enhancing the security of the borders by estab-lishing defences along geographical boundary lines. However, in many ways the expansion of Empire was not driven by pragmatic reasons, but instead by ideological ones which caused extensive damage to the structure of the Empire, with Trajan’s wars of expansion making the stability untenable. Rather than as part of a “Grand Strategy”, the expansion of the Roman Empire in the second century, something that would contribute significantly to its decline, was largely driven by an ideology of imperium sine fine (empire without limits). Indeed, the vastly increased scope of warfare that the Empire was involved with in this period suggests that the Em-pire had exceeded its limits. Rome was no longer able to easily defeat opposition, with the Marcoman-nic Wars in Germany (166-180CE) lasting over a decade and being resolved inconclusively. Certainly, it would seem that the Empire had exceeded its financial limits, with the greatly increased cost of the

army becoming difficult to support and causing vast debasement. Fur-thermore, an increase in dissent throughout the Empire suggests that this expansion caused a frag-mentation of cultural homogeneity. Though these revolts were even-tually put down, the damage they caused demonstrated a growing military deficiency. While some of these issues were the result of po-litical, rather than strategic instabil-ity, these political problems largely had the same ideological root.

A Grand Strategy

Certainly, the second century ex-pansion has not always been seen in a negative light, with Trajan of-ten being portrayed as one of the most effective Emperor’s in Rome’s “Golden Age”. While the Empire did undergo significant expansion dur-ing his reign, it also made efforts to increase defensive infrastructure. Indeed, while the exact purpose of Hadrian’s Wall and the Africae Fo-tassum are much debated, they do at the very least suggest a new rigid-ity to borders. While these projects were not necessarily defensive, they suggest considerable strate-gic forethought and planning, with Hadrian’s Wall stretching for almost 117 kilometres. This period saw the development of what has been deemed a system of “preclusive de-fensive”, which was supported not only by these vast projects but also

by an overall rise in the number of small fortifications, particularly in Palaestina Salutaris (the Negev, Si-nai and Transjordan area). This is partially the result of a more gen-eral shift in Roman political control, away from a system largely based on client states to a system which entailed more direct control. The establishment of Roman borders along natural boundaries offered a greater ability to retain strength and stability – despite the Empire’s growing scale, the establishment of a demarcated eastern frontier along the Tigris River demonstrates the strategic advantages in defining territorial borders.

However, while there were limit-ed attempts to increase defences along the borders, the notion of a centrally-directed “grand strategy” finds little support, the protracted wars of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius and Septimius Severus held little long-term strategic value. Indeed, there seems to be little evidence that notions of nationhood, as de-fined by modern political-territorial borders, were existent in antiquity, with forts holding more local aims rather than fulfilling a broader stra-tegic plan. It would have been hard for them to do so, considering the relatively limited state of cartogra-phy during this era and the 4,000 miles of Roman frontiers that had to be defended.

Dreams of Avarice

Imperium Sine Fine

Instead of strategic considerations, an imperialist ideology can be seen as the main driving factor in Roman expansion and hence decline, with the notion of imperium sine fine supposedly espoused by Romulus himself. Indeed, military success was a vital part of the emperor’s role, and one of the reasons why Hadrian (r. 117-138CE) (who main-ly focused on defensive issues) was so unpopular. Pliny the younger had many words of praise for Tra-jan’s military reforms, exclaiming how wondrous it was that Trajan had “rekindle[d] the dying flame of military discipline”, but it was these notions of military prestige which were largely responsible for incessant warfare throughout the second century. Despite the ulti-mate failure of Trajan’s Parthian campaign from 113-116CE, these attempts were shortly to be re-peated by Septimius Severus from 194-98CE. These conquests were badly miscalculated and expensive, resulting in few strategic gains, with the Parthians invading again in 155CE and 161CE and the outbreak of another major bout of war with them between 162-66CE. Further-more, Trajan’s fervour for expan-

sion caused permanent damage to the efficacy of the army, as he increasingly used auxiliary German and Sarmatian irregulars to replace the lost manpower from his cam-paigns.

The Marcomannic wars of Marcus Aurelius, were perhaps, the most indicative of the damage wrought by over-extension. With attacks starting as early as 161CE, with the Chatti raiding over the limes (lim-its) in Raetia and Upper Germany, suggesting a weakened frontier on the northern border. The Marco-mannic invasion of 166CE would push the Empire to its limits, pen-etrating deep into Italy and only being repulsed as late as 180CE. The Romans were clearly no longer strong enough to hold their bor-ders against all opposition; with strong criticism from Herodian of Marcus Aurelius’ “bargaining with money” with the German tribes, demonstrating a weakened Empire, but a resolutely militaristic ideology – with Marcus Aurelius maintaining troops across the Upper Danube and planning to expand into the central Germanic region.

The Death of an Era

While the reign of the “Five Good Emperors” has traditionally been written about as a period of rela-tive prosperity, the wars conducted by these emperors led to consider-able economic damage to the em-pire. While some short term gains were made with the construction of the Via Traiana Nova stretching from Bostra to Aqaba, these were vastly outweighed by the huge cost of a newly expanded army. This cre-ated a cyclical problem for the Em-pire as it needed to recruit more labourers to make up for its man-power deficiency, in one fell sweep not only increasing costs but also damaging the infrastructure that supported these costs. This result-ed in severe debasement during the reign of Trajan, who reduced the value of denarii to eighty-five percent of their previous value. Indeed, under Severus the pay for legionaries, auxiliaries and retire-ment rose from around 643 mil-lion sesterces to 1,127 million as it sought not only to support an ex-panded army, but win the loyalty of auxiliary troops with little reason for allegiance to the Empire. This necessitated further debasement, with the silver content of the de-narius dropping to around 55 per-cent – thus imperial ideals crippled

Dreams of Avarice

“Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that

happen to you.”Marcus Aurelius



the financial backbone of the state and fermented political unrest.

Though this period can be consid-ered one of relative stability, espe-cially when compared to the “Third Century Crisis” that followed, there was clearly a great deal of social unrest in the provinces. Though there was some degree of cultural uniformity, this was greatly weak-ened by new territorial acquisitions and the resources required to en-force uniformity were increasingly waning. The impact of the revolts that would follow indicated how reliant the empire was on the lack of ethnic identities within its bor-ders, with the Jewish revolts of 115-117CE and 132-135CE, as well of the Armenian revolts of 116CE and the revolt in Africa from 145-150CE indicating the death of any semblance of cultural homogene-

ity of social control that had pre-viously existed. Indeed, the Jew-ish diaspora revolt of 116CE killed around 220,000 people in Cyre-naica (Libya) and another 240,000 in Cypus before it was supressed. Likewise the Bar Kochba rebellion of 132CE quickly overcame the two legions under legate Tineius Ru-fus and eventually took more than four legions to suppress. Clearly the resources of the Empire were stretched to their limits, and the Roman military was unable to ex-ercise the effective control it once had over its provinces.

Although the Empire’s boundaries did increasingly resemble defensi-ble borders, the end of the second century witnessed growing military problems for the Roman Empire that were largely the result of over-extension. The expanded size of

the Empire led to greatly increased conflict with Parthia, which had never declared an unprovoked of-fensive war on Rome prior to the annexation of Armenia. While the geographical boundaries along which the Empire was formed may have been improved under Trajan, these conquests were untenable and their abandonment under Hadrian suggests they held little strategic value. The expansionist ideology which encouraged the emperors following Antoninus Pius to resume offensive wars in the east only worsened the problem of overextension, clearly the cost of the military was expanding be-yond the state’s ability to pay for it. Certainly the ‘stable fabric’ of the Empire seemed to have withered away, with various revolts in the provinces suggesting the subtle, but gradual death of Roman rule.

Dreams of Avarice

Searching forShadows

THE MULTIPLICITY OF MEANING IN STORIES


Set in fascist Spain, Pan’s Labyrinth provides a fascinating insight into the nature of storytelling, the dangers of authoritarian “truths” and how various narratives intertwine to create our own subjective reality. Contains some spoilers.

A TWISTED FAIRYTALE

By Aurelius Noble

Pan’s Labyrinth is as much a fairy tale as it is a story about the nature of fairy tales. Set shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War, it is the tale of a young girl, Ofelia, who travels with her mother to meet her new step-father, the fascist Captain Vidal. Her consequent struggles with and disobedience against the Captain are intertwined with her quest to reclaim her position as the princess of the underworld, after her meeting with an ancient faun deep within his labyrinth. The con-struction of these two parallel and yet opposite worlds, reality and fantasy, uses symbolism, imagery and metaphor to bring about the conflict between ideas of control and permanence with those of im-agination and subjectivity. The film begins focused on Ofelia’s face as she slowly bleeds to death, this is not a typical fairy tale - instead it seeks to break down the very no-tions of the genre and through do-ing so demonstrate the importance of disobedience.

Ofelia herself begins her fairytale by recounting the story of a mag-ical blue mountain rose to her yet unborn brother, she talks wistfully of this dying rose atop a mountain surrounded by poisoned thorns. “Men talked amongst themselves about their fear of death and pain, but never about the promise of eternal life. And every day, the rose

wilted, unable to bequeath its gift to anyone... forgotten and lost at the top of that cold, dark moun-tain, forever alone, until the end of time.” Notions of permanence and time are central to the film’s themes, with Captain Vidal’s obses-sion with time denoting a deeper longing for control and order, but also an awareness that in the end all that exists is the emptiness of death, and that fascism in particu-lar merely forces us to accept this. This rose story is emblematic of the entire conflict between the Span-ish rebels and the fascist regime, the blue flower of freedom wilting as men forget about it, as concern with the immediacy of death and pain clouds their visions of the fu-ture - hope, like stories, soon dies if forgotten.

Through the use of fairy tales, which in recent years have largely been giving authoritative sources, first through the likes of Charles Perrault, then the Brothers Grimm and now Disney, Guillermo del Toro demonstrates the flaws of follow-ing a singular source. In remaining faithful to singular sources, mod-ern adaptations of fairy tales tend to limit themselves to the values and moralities of their authors, in many cases adopting conservative patriarchal values where the prince always comes to save the damsel in distress.

The film decries such attempts to create a singular tale, with del Toro passing much of the interpretation and hence storytelling to his audi-ence. While Captain Vidal attempts to write his own singular story, where his truth is “the” truth and “rebels” are murdered on his com-mand, this inevitably misses the complexity of reality (and indeed fantasy) and is in large part respon-sible for his death. Pan’s Labyrinth removes these limitations by draw-ing on many different sources of in-spiration, rather than relying on just one - it does not give any particular source or interpretation complete control over the narrative, as vari-ous intertwined images and inspi-rations vie for meaning. Indeed, the two parallel stories within the film, that of the mystical quest and the political drama, are deeply


“He who controls the past

controls the future. He who

controls the present controls

the past.”1984,

George Orwell, 1949


connected, with neither becoming dominant or gaining validity over the other. Although there is eventu-ally a confrontation between reality and fantasy, with Vidal approaching Ofelia but unable to see the faun she is talking to, del Toro does not allow this to simplify the narrative to one story. While Vidal’s perspec-tive would suggest that her quest and this fantasy world are simply a coping mechanism for Ofelia in a world filled with pain and loss; just moments earlier we saw Vidal being drugged, diminishing his re-liability as a source and sowing doubt in any singular perspective, diminishing the narrative truth and refusing to obey a desire for an all encompassing explanation.

This theme of disobedience remains highly pertinent throughout the film as a critique of fascist thought, while in typical fairy tales disobe-dience is the act that sets the tale into motion, in Pan’s Labyrinth it is framed as an essential quality. The disobedience of the rebels keep the “fairy tale” of a democratic Spain alive, while Ofelia’s disobedience to her mother, the Captain and the

faun not only set the story in mo-tion but keep the varied strands of it alive - with Ofelia’s refusal to shed the blood of an innocent, in par-ticular, showing that even the most minute act of betrayal could have terrible consequences. Even with-in the film itself, there is a level of disobedience, with the exhaustive referencing of varied sources un-dermining the master narrative of the film and creating a multiplicity in which the film is almost an act of disobedience to the story it is try-ing to tell. This stands in defiance to Vidal, who like authoritarian re-gimes or patriarchal fairy tales in general, seek to limit the number of stories that can be told from a set of events to just one.

By building up a network of referenc-es within the film, del Toro makes meaning a matter of choice, a story determined by the interpreter. In particular in the scene containing the Pale Man, a child-eating mon-ster, the film references a broad va-riety of myths and stories, with the monster representing various gods and demons from Krampus to Kro-nos. Furthermore, through strong

links with the themes of the rest of the film it allows for free interpre-tation, with a pile of child’s shoes at the monster’s feet either acting to remind us of the shoes Ofelia will later wear when she enters the mystical realm, or of the piles left at Nazi concentration camps - as the viewer chooses. This collection of references and how the view-er chooses to follow them makes truth a matter of perspective, they bring fairy tales back to an earlier form of myth where varied oral in-terpretations of stories defied any single narrative. With Ofelia diso-beying the orders of the fairies by eating some of the entrancing fruit at the Pale Man’s table, the scene functions as a metaphor to demon-strate that the beauty of these myths can enchant us, but that reli-ance on a singular interpretation or the appeal of beauty may not be to our advantage.

The scene can also be seen as a reference to Vidal himself, with the Pale Man acting as a metaphor for both the Captain, who later shoots a child, and for fascist Spain; which is aimed at preserving the existing

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence

about truth.”Brave New World,

Aldous Huxley, 1932


38 | veramag.co.uk | FEBRUARY 2016 Searching for Shadows

order through the disempower-ment of the young and revolution-ary. Yet, criticism is not limited to fascism, but extends beyond this to any form of dogmatic storytell-ing, such as that seen in religious texts. Varied references to images akin to those in Roman Catholic churches, with paintings of the Pale Man reminiscent of “La Via Crucis” and “Stations of the Cross”, seek to demonstrate the role of religion within a broader mythology and its malleability to a certain strain of truth, despite its insistence of its own principles. Indeed, when Vidal talks of the necessity of killing the rebels at a dinner party, the first to agree with him is a priest who states “God has already saved their souls, what happens to their bodies hardly matters to him.” This echoes the problem of overarching narra-tives, where the priests interpreta-tion of the story becomes accept-ed it endangers those who do not share in it.

Throughout the film there remains an obsession with death, marked by Vidal’s fixation on time. He spends much of his time in the film tend-ing to his father’s pocket watch, stopped when it cracked upon the instance of his death. Vidal’s tem-poral obsession denotes his preoc-cupation with death, which in turn signals his desire to tell a singular,

contained story. In many ways he wants his life to be this solitary story, simplified (like that of his father’s) to a moment of heroism, its ending marked by his death. It seems in many ways then, that Vidal is sim-ply waiting to die, as he climbs a hill in the forest amidst heavy gunfire from the rebels he calmly acknowl-edges that this would be “the only decent way to die”, and indeed he meets his end with a weary resig-nation. This mirrors the way au-thoritarian history is told, the tales of great men, marked by their great deeds and eventual death - with lit-tle thought for the complexity of the narrative. The only way to es-cape these restraints is to disobey, thus near Vidal’s final moments his wish that his son be told the time of his death is disobeyed, breaking the temporal containment of a sin-gular narrative strand. The reversal of time marking both the beginning and the end of the film show that in reality narratives have no set be-ginning or end, the introduction of this confusion, this chaos, upsets an authoritarian story where a sto-ry may simply be told. While fairy tales typically finish with the words “The End” this story has no defini-tive end, it takes a formulaic genre and defies our expectations, defies the narrative it is supposed to give. Although the rebels capture and kill Vidal, Spain remains under Fascist rule for another thirty years. Ofe-lia’s ending is equally ambiguous, although she is murdered, we have known this from the start, and she still manages to finish her mystical quest. There is no singular way the ending can be interpreted, and that is how it was intended: it can be seen as simply a metaphorical, po-etic ending to a dark story; a hap-py ending to a fairy tale; or simply as the story that Ofelia wanted to tell, whether we believe her or not.

These multiple, intertwining nar-ratives reach out beyond the film, with no single story able to contain them all. Myths are not defined by their creator, but instead by those who tell them, over and over - this fairy tale, this myth, allows us to in-terpret it as we will, to tell our own stories.

“I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a

fool.” Shooting an Elephant,

George Orwell, 1948

“That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrast-ing memo-ries” IQ84,Haruki Murakami, 2009


The disturbing tale of a descent into madness along the Congo River, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness paints a disturbing portrait of colonial Africa and through this canvas demonstrates the broader relations between power, identity and race. Contains spoilers.

BLANK SPACES

By Meg Dyson

Before words appear upon the page, before fantasy manifests it-self in reality, all that can exist is endless possibility – of triumph and of trauma. This is evidenced most vividly in the indelible, and perhaps under-appreciated words of Taylor Swift: ‘Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane, but I’ve got a blank space, baby, and I’ll write your name’. While Swift’s hit 2014 single might appear to have little in common with Joseph Con-rad’s 1899 ‘Heart of Darkness’ - the tale of British sailor’s journey down the Congo river and concurrent de-scent into the depths of depravity - certain similarities reveal them-selves through this shared strand: the potential of emptiness. Indeed, in a monologue given by Marlow, Conrad’s protagonist, there is clear and familiar recognition of the al-lure of blankness: ‘Now, when I was a little chap, I had a passion for maps. […] At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map, I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.’

Both Swift and Conrad seem to note the inherent contradiction and complexity in the idea of a blank space; as a concept, it is de-fined by absence, and within every blank space the possibility of words or ink or darkness lurks, inevitable and waiting. Without a history or

geography to reside within, neither Swift’s ‘long list of ex-lovers’ nor the surrounding lines on the map can exist. White spaces rely on the comparison point of dark spaces. Through his description of maps, Marlow signals the beginnings of a story about race, travel, and colo-nialism; this reference to blankness and darkness is only the beginning of the analysis of colour and sym-bolism which permeates the novel. By examining the co-dependent relationship between opposites, such as black and white, Conrad explores notions of racial identity within empire and through this the symbiotic nature of the identity of oppressed and the oppressor. The reversal of traditional racial image-ry, with the space being colonised represented by whiteness and the colonisers represented by black ink and darkness, is used to highlight the limitations and damage caused by the so-called “civilising mission”. There is a certain beauty to the un-known, but deep within the jungles of the Congo: ‘It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness.’

As the novel progresses Conrad re-turns to a more traditional concep-tion of blackness and whiteness: ‘the edge of a colossal jungle, so dark green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight,

like a ruled line’. The ‘ruled line’ continues the map metaphor, and the ‘almost black’ ‘colossal jungle’ is juxtaposed with the ‘white surf’, in this there is a clear comparison between the civilised and orderly nature of that which can be seen and understood, and the darkness of the unknown.

However, this contradiction of ear-lier notions of the blankness of the unknown is by no means unin-tentional, Conrad later writes: ‘all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if nature her-self had tried to ward off intruders; […] whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted man-groves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.’ Here, the water becomes dangerous, savage, and symboli-cally linked to the ‘dark continent’ through the association with mud and slime; the coast is ‘formless’, with no ruled lines to speak of, but that imagery is unstable. The water ‘invaded the contorted mangoes’ – it moves from defence to attack, and the mangroves themselves, writhing in an ‘impotent despair’, seem connected to the ‘deathlike indifference of unhappy savag-es’ as Conrad describes the slaves he meets at the start of the nov-el. This notion of nature as amor-phous, with the original ‘white surf’ demarcating the compliancy


of the blank ocean space leading homewards, contrasts strongly not only with the defensive darkness of the jungle, but also of the dan-gerous waters which border the coast as he approaches – suggest-ing through this imagery of reac-tive nature, a certain sense of not belonging. Conrad tells us about a fog which envelops Marlow’s ship: ‘You looked on amazed, and began to suspect yourself of being deaf—then the night came suddenly, and struck you blind as well. […] When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy, and more blinding than the night.’ Again, the symbolic associations of black and white, dark and light, are switched round, as Marlow claims that the ‘white fog’ was ‘more blinding than the night’. Conrad destabilises ra-cial imagery, reversing the posi-tions of the archetypal opposites

black and white. Kurtz embodies this disruption of traditional moral and racial signifiers - in Marlow’s words: ‘He had kicked the very earth to pieces. He was alone, and I before him did not know whether I stood on the ground or floated in the air.’ Through Kurtz, Conrad be-gins to prod at the foundations of empire and the idea of an essential superiority.

‘“And this also” said Marlow sud-denly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth”’. Marlow’s phil-osophical monologue about empire at the start of the novel establishes Conrad’s feelings towards empire and identity within it; he compares the English traders and colonisers in Africa to the Roman invasion of Britain, pointing out that the Brit-ish and European imperialists have not always been so successful: he

says that a Roman might ‘Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery’. The repetition of the loaded term ‘sav-agery’ seems to foreshadow the novel’s most famous line, uttered by Kurtz on his deathbed: ‘the hor-ror, the horror’ – the ambiguous horror that Kurtz sees as he slips into darkness is relative, and every-where; it can be found in the riv-ers of England as well as the dark waters of the Congo. Criticising the Romans, Marlow says ‘they were conquerors, and for that you only want brute force – nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others’. This is clearly a damning summary of imperialism, differences between the Roman and British empires aside – Conrad suggests that there

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is ‘nothing to boast of’ in having brute strength over others. He ex plicitly demonstrates that empire is not a stable or inherent right, and that there is no fixed racial superi-ority, but instead an ‘accident aris-ing from the weakness of others.’ He also makes this point through allusion – the name Marlow can be interpreted as a reference to Chris-topher Marlowe, whose 16th cen-tury play ‘Dr Faustus’ is referenced by Conrad in the line: ‘I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistoph-eles’, describing a brickmaker. Me-phistopheles is the name of the devil’s messenger who grants Faus-tus magic and in return for his soul: he is a shapeshifter, representing a lack of stable identity, and when asked by Faustus why, as a devil, he is on earth rather than in hell, Me-phistopheles famously replies ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ The implication is that hell, like empire, darkness, and blank spaces, is rel-ative. Having experienced heaven, everything else is hell to Mephis-topheles – hell is defined by what it is not, rather than by any inher-ent quality. Conrad continues this sense of relativity, portrays empire as a wheel of fortune which gives countries and peoples a moment of glory at the top, before they fall, inevitably and in a spinning haze of

colour, to the bottom of the wheel. Identity, irrevocably linked to em-pire in Imperialist literature, follows this wheel of fortune and relies once again on Swift’s blank spaces.

The colonialist characters con-struct their identities in opposition to what they see as dark, savage, and uncivilised; they have to define the ‘other’ before they can define themselves. Marlow repeatedly emphasises how the ‘savages’ he meets are somehow less than hu-man; he says: ‘they had faces like grotesque masks - these chaps’, and later ‘two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up’. They are not people, only ‘masks’ or ‘bundles’. Marlow also calls them ‘creatures’, ‘phan-toms’. They become collections of ideas – darkness, mud, sweat, un-cleanliness, savagery - projected onto bodies. The negatives of these ideas – whiteness, cleanliness, civ-ilisation, sophistication – in turn become the basis of the colonis-ers’ identities within the novel. Yet again, however, Conrad points out that these thought categories of identity are not fixed – Marlow says of Kurtz: ‘There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth’. Kurtz embodies the relativi-

ty of identity; having ruled from the top of the wheel, he falls into cor-ruption and illness, ‘kicking himself loose’ of the categories to which he previously belonged. Marlow finds in him not civility and pureness but darkness itself: Marlow describes, as Kurtz dies, the way that his voice ‘survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart’. Kurtz represents and becomes the dark-ness - suggested in the title - which haunts the entire book; the sup-posedly clean, pure, and civilised mission which he undertakes is slowly filled in with darkness and corruption, signalling a reversal of Marlow’s map metaphor and par-adigmatically embodying Conrad’s feelings towards empire and its fu-ture – Kurtz death is arguably the climax of the novel. In a review of Heart of Darkness for the Tele-graph, David Miller wrote: ‘Conrad composed a book where we see ourselves, darkly’. This epitomises Conrad’s exploration of identity; the novel acts as a mirror for both the readers and the characters, who, somewhere along Marlow’s journey down the Congo River, see their own darkness revealed in spaces that appeared blank.


“I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires,

rather than in attempting to satisfy them.”

John Stuart Mill


A deeply dark and troubled examination of a society fuelled by an obsession with material possesions, Fight Club offers a fascinating insight into the problems of relativist and nihilist systems of morality. Contains many spoilers.

JACK’S SMIRKING REVENGE

By Aurelius Noble

The essence of David Fincher’s adaptation of Fight Club can per-haps be best surmised in these words - Fight Club is not so much a revolutionary manifesto, as it is an attack on a value system that is essentially based on lies, the fore-most of which is that you matter in any way. Chaos, it would seem, is the antithesis of this orderly lie - it is through Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem that the world begins to resemble something viscerally chaotic, and undeniably honest. The story of an insomniac worker confronting an increasingly con-sumerist and meaningless reality, Fight Club documents a decline in meaning through the assump-tion of an identity based on ex-ternal perceptions. Through this it denotes a broader critique of notions that there is any objective or cosmic value to our lives, sug-gesting that it is the responsibil-ity of the individual to find their own raison d’etre. Indeed, in a post Judeo-Christian world, the essence of truth, the base values of the world become untethered. “First they built churches, now they build offices”, thus spake Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, or at least one can imagine so. With the de-cline of Christianity has arisen ex-istential decadence and lethargy, in many ways the post-modern world is necessarily a nihilist one, and it is through the medium of

anarchy that Fight Club forces a confrontation between notions of nihilism and a modernity charac-terised by its obsession with con-sumerism. Abnormally of nihilist critiques of modern values, this is not aimed at typical ethical value systems, but rather at the values which denote personal worth and self-esteem.

The destruction of the narrator’s material possessions and the con-sequent destruction of his iden-tity imply the folly of entrusting a sense of self-worth in the opin-ions of others, built upon material values with no objective value (at least not in a metaphysical sense). The solution then, it would seem, is to “reject the base assumptions of civilisation, especially the im-portance of material possessions”, yet the destruction of an existing value system (if it were even pos-sible), does not provide a very satisfactory resolution. In a way this means the premise of Tyler’s ideology is flawed; the notion that destroying debt and equalising everyone economically is remote-ly relevant contradicts the very notion that material possessions do not matter. Surely if this were the case it would not be equali-sation of possessions, but rather utter eradication which is need-ed, except in the case of needing the barest necessities for surviv-al; which hardly seems the focus


“There is a taint of

death, a flavour of

mortality in lies - which is exactly what

I hate and detest in the world - what

I want to forget.”

Heart of Darkness,

Joseph Conrad, 1899

of Tyler’s largely first world pro-ject. Indeed, even in the anarchic post-capitalist order that Tyler at-tempts to create, there is still an identity system - now based upon notions of masculinity. Though there is an attempt to maintain a complete disinterest in identity, through consistent undermining of personal belief - “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. Not the car you drive. Not the contents of your wallet. Not your flip flops and kha-kis. You are the all singing, all danc-ing crap of the world.” - this seems to stand in stark opposition with why members join Project May-hem, they want to matter. Thus, throughout Tyler’s endeavour’s

there is a twisting of agendas - with something that was initially meant to bring back meaning by instilling the urge to survive in members (the Fight Club) taking on a broader morality that is already inherently conflicted with its earlier critique of baseless values.

The Lost Generation

However, as noted earlier that is partially because Fight Club is not, and is not intended to be a revo-lutionary manifesto - fulfilling the role of an interesting critique with-out necessarily supplying many of the answers. In many ways the film finds its strengths in providing

a previously absent attack on im-potency of the post-modern world and a deep sense of anger. Thus, in many ways Fincher finds his mirror in the earlier works of 1920s au-thors, with Evelyn Waugh’s work on the decadence of the “Bright Young Things” in London and the sense of impotence outlined in both T.S. El-iot’s Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock and in his The Hollow Men. In this sense Fincher’s Fight Club is meant as a generational symbol of revolu-tion, if not a call to arms, then at least a cause for introspection. In some ways history seems to repeat itself, with an ambiguity of purpose and morality fermenting a mate-rial obsession that comes close to representing identity when other


46 | veramag.co.uk | FEBRUARY 2016 Searching for Shadows

aspects of identity, such as nation-ality, cease to matter. The shift in meaning from discipline and mar-tial purpose towards a more eco-nomic obsession is well document-ed, especially in the case of Japan which, since the collapse of its em-pire and in the wake of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, has found an increasingly pervasive “herbivore” identity problem amongst young men - causing a severe demograph-ic problem as large portions of the populace find themselves feeling emasculated and asexual.

Similar generational theories have found their way into the academic work of sociologists. The Stauss-Howe theory chronicles what they saw as a four-stage cycle of social change, moving from an era where post-crisis institutions are strong and individualism is weak, then to a more critical stage where individ-ual identity begins to assert itself and eventually overcome institu-tions until a crisis is provoked and institutions are rebuilt to constitute the new order. In many ways this is nearly mirrored by Tyler’s disdain for a post-crisis era, “We’re the mid-dle children of history, no purpose, no place. We have no great war, no great depression, our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives”. In a society where feel-

ing is so numbed, the only way the participants can find anything that matters to them is through relying on something they can objectively value about their lives, the ability to survive. Fight Club is the sto-ry, then, of a generation weighed down by their responsibilities to institutions - who cannot escape from the numbing pressures of an immovable reality without resort-ing to drastic measures.

Certainly the film has strong an-ti-theistic themes, but while few would agree that humanity has found its place, what Tyler embrac-es above all else is the notion that there is no need to find a broader purpose. Though perhaps unre-alised by the members of Project Mayhem, the crux of Tyler’s rhet-oric isn’t about doing something meaningful, it’s about accepting that we don’t matter. Indeed, one of the few things that can be agreed on, and something which Tyler rel-ishes, is that “you’re the same de-caying organic matter as everything else” and that soon enough you and everyone you know will be nothing but a handful of dust. Yet this does some misjustice to Pal-chuniak’s message, which is not an entirely nihilist one in essence, but a uniquely individual relativist one, in which individual self-worth can-not be measured by possessions, but neither can it measured by ob-jective moral standards; instead we must seek our own path to “pre-mature enlightenment”. Rather than providing a solution to these moral problems, Fight Club focuses on a more basic and more press-ing issue - that to escape from our worries is not to solve them, that confrontation with our pain, for in-stance through the application of lye burns, is the only way to bring reality and existence, in a cosmic

sense, back into our locus of con-trol.

Yet the film is not about glorifying pain, violence or indeed death - though there is a finality and pur-pose given to death, that is some-how lacking in life, the film seeks to distance itself from the insignif-icance to death given in the book. Though to the individual, life re-mains just as pointless as ever, in death a collective relativist mean-ing can be assigned to a person’s life, even when they are past the point of it mattering. This is clear-est in the case of Robert Paulson, a relatively insignificant figure in life, who in death finds the finality of identity lacking from his life by re-assuming his name. In the words of the wartime poet Sigfried Sassoon :

However this notion of completion falls to the earlier critique of ex-ternal validation - it only assumes significance upon death, where it thereupon becomes worthless. Thus rather than providing some notion of posthumous purpose the film uses this to force the narrator to confront a final analysis of his life, indeed with a loaded gun in his mouth the first line the narrator utters is “I can’t think of anything”, the film concludes with same re-mark, suggesting that through all these pain and trauma he hasn’t found a meaning to his life, but per-haps that isn’t what he was looking for.

“Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s

other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not

as lost Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men The stuffed men.”

The Hollow Men,T.S. Eliot, 1925

“The dead are more real than the living

because they are complete.”

Sigfried Sassoon

The Death of Dreams

Throughout the film Tyler’s focus remains utterly singular, devoted to himself and his cause, yet the utter lack of empathy and personal con-nection he feels is not echoed in the narrator. While the film crosses over grand themes of identity, mo-rality and purpose, it is ultimately the story of one man and all the people he connects with. The film begins with the narrator attend-ing support groups in an attempt to connect with other people and throughout this process both the narrator and Tyler seek to forge relationships with those around them, though in different ways.

While Tyler’s objectives remain rooted in an obsession with his own sense of purpose and agenda, this is exhibited in the controlling rela-tionships he maintains with those around him. Yet the film seeks to distance itself from this simplistic ideological interpretation of the world, suggesting that a dogmatic pursuit of singular self-belief can make you lose sight of the things that, illogically, matter to you. In many ways, the narrator’s evolving

relationship with Marla highlights his own insecurities, but it also showcases that while confronting existential problems is preferred to ignoring them, the same must be said of emotional problems - that ideological pursuits should not and cannot forever override that which matters on a more personal level. In his final confrontation with Tyler, the narrator’s “eyes are open”, he sees not only the inadequacy of Ty-ler’s solution but the unnecessary pain it will cause; the problems in this world cannot be solved simply by destroying their foundations and it takes an appreciation for individ-ual worth to find a more pragmatic solution. Though the narrator re-mains cynical and disillusioned, a realisation of cosmic unimportance and the fallibility of externally based assessments of worth does not mean that subjectively other people cannot matter to you.

This then, is not actually a film about changing the world, it in many ways represents a more per-sonal story about finding meaning in life, though it chronicles many ethical and moral dilemmas, it re-mains the story of someone who is searching for some meaning or connection, whether that be on a

personal or universal scale. There is no world to be saved, just a churn-ing mass of seven billion people, each with their own problems and worries. These problems remain so entwined and minute on a grand scale, that the best anyone could hope to do is find their own limited meaning in knowing that they are helping. A singular solution to the world’s woes is not what Fight Club is about, that is why it transcends more recent adaptations. The no-tion that an individual has the pow-er to solve the world, as if it were a puzzle, is merely a temporary distraction from the pain that Fight Club so consistently forces us to confront. While the film illuminates some of the key problems with modern morality and identity, as outlined above, it does not do the audience the disservice of pretend-ing these problems have an imme-diate solution. The simplistic notion of Tyler’s premise, put forward so simply by his digital era equivalent Elliott Alderson, “I wanted to save the world” highlights the failures of such a simplistic aim - in the rath-er apt words of Ernest Hemingway “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”.

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They’re the whores

and angels of our striving selves.”

John le Carre, Unknown


DarkenedUplands

IMPERIALISM IN A POST-COLONIAL WORLD


A fledgling state, North Vietnam was forced into conflict with two major powers within its first decades - the two Indochina wars, in particular the war with America demon-strates the limits of democratic imperialism in the face of nascent nationalism.

THE LOST WAR

By Aurelius Noble

The David and Goliath story of our era, the Second Indochina (or Vietnam) war demonstrates per-haps the earliest culmination of US attempts to act as a global arbiter of conflicts. Though it is difficult to isolate the exact years of US in-volvement, a period of conflict was existent from 1955, with the US sending non-advisory forces from 1965 onwards, only withdrawing two years before the final capture of Saigon in 1975. Though some-what limited in scope the Vietnam war played an integral role in the much broader conflict between capitalist and communist forces in the first and second world, as the US sought to pursue a policy of containment. While the US and its South Vietnamese allies relied heavily on air superiority and over-whelming firepower, this would ul-timately prove calamitous for them as the continuous losses from gue-rilla warfare conducted by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army would eventually render public opinion more firmly against the war. Indeed, the North Vietnamese government in many ways saw this not so much as an ideological war as a national war of independence from the grasp of colonial powers.

The American-Vietnamese war fol-lowed on from an earlier conflict between Vietnamese and French forces, fought between 1946 and 1954 following Ho Chi Minh’s dec-

laration of independence at the end of the Second World War, cul-minating in a decisive defeat for the French at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. From as early as 1950, US military advisors began to arrive in French Indochina in an attempt to support the French-backed govern-ment of Ngo Dinh Diem, who would form the Republic of Vietnam south of the 17th parallel. During the In-ternational Geneva Conference of 1954 the boundaries of South and North Vietnam were set along this parallel with a demilitarised zone in between - yet this was never meant to be a permanent divide, with the Geneva Accords promising to hold US moderated elections in 1956 to determine the government for a united Vietnam. Upon realising that Ho Chi Minh would easily have won this subsequent election, with an estimated eighty percent of the populace voting for him, the US postponed the elections indefinite-ly - the stage for conflict was set, though the war would take many several decades to play itself out.

Though it would send limited num-bers of troops over during the earli-er years, US commitment escalated

rapidly following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, where an Ameri-can destroyer clashed with a North Vietnamese vessel, giving Presi-dent Johnson the pretence to au-thorise the deployment of regular combat troops from 1965 onwards. The war rapidly escalated, with US involvement peaking in 1968 - the same year that the Communists launched the Tet Offensive, an un-precedented assault on South Viet-nam with over 400,000 troops and 17,000 casualties for the North. Although the Tet Offensive would fail in its ostensible purpose of overthrowing the South Vietnam-ese government, it marked a turn-ing point with numerous casualties on both sides helping turn the US populace against the war. As the mood soured the US were forced to begin decreasing troop presence in Vietnam, thus ensued a period of Vietnamisation, as the US tried to transfer the task of fighting the Communists to the South Vietnam-ese Army. Despite the signing of the Paris Peace Accord in January 1973, fighting continued until the capture of Saigon in 1975, though the US withdrew direct military involve-ment in August 1973. The war can-not be described as anything other than a tragedy, that is even more so than other wars, yet its failings help illuminate the imperial pretensions of the US and its limitations.

Darkened Uplands

“The world breaks every-one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

A Farewell to Arms,Ernest Hemingway, 1929

A Guerilla War

US failure in Vietnam was largely due to the tactical focus of the US army, which due to the earlier conflicts of the Second World War (1941-45) and the Korean War (1950-53) was still largely set-up for conducting traditional, big-unit warfare - thus it found itself ill-suited to fighting guerilla warfare on such a large scale. Indeed, this in failed efforts to win “hearts and minds” and an inability to confront a hidden en-emy who relied on novel Guerilla tactics, partially derived from Mao Zedong, resulted in a protracted war of attrition that was extremely costly and continually sapped mo-rale, weakening the resolve of a (somewhat) democratically direct-ed war. Eisenhower’s adoption of the strategy of Massive Retaliation in 1954 meant that while the army remained capable of deploying nuclear weapons, it reduced the troop count so much that it lacked the manpower to wage small-unit warfare. This focus on traditional warfare meant that the US could not hold areas from guerilla control for extended periods. In both Oper-ations Circle Pines and Cedar Falls in 1966, despite destroying enemy installations and inflicting higher casualties, these victories were short-lived with Guerillas shortly re-infiltrating the areas. Further-more, the US could not continue these victories indefinitely, it was rapidly losing a war of attrition with the use of 160,000 artillery shells from August to October 1966 by the US 25th Division killing only a hundred men. The war was costing the US heavily while the North con-tinued to recruit men faster than it lost them, demonstrating a far greater commitment that would result in far higher national morale

despite far greater loss of life by the North Vietnamese. Indeed, the North continued to receive ample supplies from the USSR and China, with the Soviets sending over 3,000 technicians, and China sending 300,000 troops to maintain supply lines in 1964. By 1967 Vietnam was costing a strained US economy $3.6 billion a year and Pacification was making little progress, as America gradually lost the will to fight.

While the tactic of Pacification, through gaining the trust of the local populace and uprooting lo-cal insurgency, had the potential to procure success, it was applied poorly and failed to win over the populace - this allowed insurgen-cy to remain rife and ultimately played a large role in destabilising the Government of South Viet-nam. Pacification failed to address political issues and thus support for the North, largely arising from Communist popularity due to help-ing combat famine during World War Two, remained high. Indeed, the Government of South Vietnam resisted US efforts, through Am-bassador Lodge, to instigate social upheaval through rural construc-tion programs and remained highly unpopular, tainted by association with the French and the fervent Catholicism of President Diem. The policy of Pacification was given lit-tle credence by the South Vietnam-ese Government and thus failed to successfully eliminate enemy ap-paratus, with the more traditional Army of the Republic of Vietnam

given precedence in recruitment over the Popular Forces and Re-gional Forces, which were intend-ed to more soft-handed as a more local, small-unit alternative to tra-ditional armed forces. The folly of this is clear, with the regional forces actually losing manpower between 1956-66 despite accounting for 12-30% of Viet Cong deaths in those years and only consuming 2-4% of the war budget. Indeed, alterna-tive attempts by US forces and the National Police were largely unsuc-cessful, with the County Fair tactics by the US proving hugely costly and meeting with little success in terms of winning over the popu-lace. President Thieu’s Accelerated Pacification program following on from the Tet Offensive was similar-ly unsuccessful, rather than focus-ing on winning “hearts and minds” it largely rewarded units by body count produced, leading to an ina-bility to instigate long-term change and in many cases worsening cor-ruption and poor leadership with-in the army. The US was unable to define its enemy, and in particular US intelligence was unable to com-bat Viet Cong infrastructure effec-tively, with the CIA’s Phoenix Pro-gram having a very limited impact - largely because US operators did not even understand the language of the Vietnamese. Likewise, the Province and District Intelligence and Operation Coordinating Cen-tres, which were set up to remove Viet Cong cadres, remained ex-tremely ineffective, as despite be-ing Vietnamese run they were crip-pled with corruption - Communist infrastructure remained strong, while Southern cadres were quickly eliminated.

Although the US played a prevalent role in the war, they recognised that their presence could not be

Darkened Uplands

“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the

end you will tire of it first.”

Ho Chi Minh



indefinite and that the crux of the fighting would have to be passed to South Vietnamese forces even-tually. Yet these forces remained hampered by poor training and corruption, making the process of Vietnamisation largely destined for failure. Indeed, there are numer-ous instances where the damage caused by the corruption of the Southern military is clear, with the Battle of Ap Bac on January 2nd 1963 proving a prime example. The much larger force of 1400 South Vietnamese soldiers was decisively defeated by 350 guerillas, who suf-fered only eighteen losses. Indeed, the battle went so badly that one of the South Vietnamese generals, General Cao, barraged positions held by his own troops in order to increase “enemy” body counts. Despite several US commanders attempting to limit the corrup-tion of Diem’s troops, few notable steps were taken to remove cor-rupt officers. By permitting cor-ruption General Harkins severely damaged the capabilities of the South Vietnamese military, fighting against more committed Commu-nist troops. This problem persisted throughout the war, with the prac-tice of officers keeping dead troops on their rosters to receive their pay remaining as high as 20 percent in 1968. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam was ill-trained, corrupt and lacking morale, with desertion rates as high as seventeen percent in 1968, thus it found itself incapa-ble of wearing down the far more effective Northern forces.

The continued focus on body-count and continued measures of tradi-tional success resulted in a severe misestimation of the South Viet-namese position. Not only did they have to defeat the North, but win the support of their own populace.

The use of techniques like defolia-tion, which was used on 1,570,113 acres in 1962, while tactical con-tributing to the war effort wors-ened the social conditions that ex-acerbated the problems facing the South Vietnamese Government. Although the Regional Forces and Popular Forces were intended to be led separately to take a more regional approach, they were later usually led by commanders from the Army of the Republic of Viet-nam and used in Search and De-stroy missions, limiting the ability of the Government of Vietnam to win widespread support. In many cases military success actually dam-aged the war effort; despite the re-pulsion of the Tet offensive in 1968 being deemed a victory by military commanders, it led to the creation of 800,000 refugees and hugely ex-acerbated political problems.

Political Turmoil

Clearly the war was not to be won merely on a tactical or strategic level, it would require the estab-lishment of a stable and popular order. However, the US found it-self unable to create a sustainable government for the Republic of Vietnam, this was partially due to the societal structure of Vietnam, but also a shared revolutionary his-tory which meant that the regime lacked the support of the people. The civil service was tainted by its association with the French, in-deed Diem himself was Bao Dai’s (the French puppet Emperor) Min-ister of the Interior in 1933. Dissent was widespread and was ruthlessly suppressed, with 20,000 incarcer-ations of dissidents by 1956. This lack of support for Diem was most clearly seen during the Buddhist Crisis of 1963, when Diem’s forces arrested and attacked hundreds

of students and Buddhists. By Au-gust of 1963 17,000 Buddhists were demonstrating in Saigon and Diem had to declare martial law, his government was on the verge of collapse. Yet, this problem of in-stability was exacerbated by the US who encouraged Diem’s downfall. On the 1st November 1963 fight-ing erupted between various South Vietnamese factions and a junta headed by General Minh forced Diem out of power, but quickly proved inept and was displaced yet again by General Khanh shortly af-terwards. The Government of the Republic of Vietnam was propped up by the US and thus was incapa-ble of autonomy, its economy had been ruined by eight years of war with the North and was only able to stave off collapse because the US pumped $127 million dollars into its economy between 1955 and 1959, inequitably contribut-ing to the standard of living and exacerbating social inequality. The sole attempt to improve the rural economy, the “miracle rice” pro-gram, had negligible impact and the use of defoliation and strategic hamlets worsened social problems - with around 7 million refugees from 1965-72. The pilot of the stra-tegic hamlets program, Operation Sunrise, was an abysmal failure it attempted to move peasants from their villages into protected and isolated hamlets, but was hugely unpopular moving many peasants out of their homes involuntarily. Yet through Diem’s urgings these pro-gram was expanded and the prob-lem was worsened.

Even in the event of relative mili-tary “victories” for the US forces, the US public had an increasingly negative view of the war - especially following the Tet Offensive. Indeed, mistaken reports on the offensive

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by NBC and Newsweek, which re-ported that the US embassy in Sai-gon had been captured, continued to add fuel to the anti-war move-ment. Even as the South Vietnam-ese began to meet with moderate success, pacifying large elements of the countryside by 1970, the an-ti-war movement, which had risen from around 60,000 protestors in 1962 to 350,000 in 1972, and the climate surrounding the Watergate scandal resulted in intense political pressure on the Nixon administra-tion to withdraw. Indeed, Nixon would go as far as to say that the political argument about executive powers following from Watergate meant that it was no longer possi-ble to enforce any agreement upon the North Vietnamese.

Fire in the Lake

However the role of military tactics and political failings can seem large-ly inconsequential when compared to longer term factors in the devel-opment of a Vietnamese “shared revolutionary history”, which made the creation of a stable South Vi-etnamese government extremely unlikely and severely heightened the chance of political failure. The French subjugation of Indochina in 1865 continued a long history of Vietnamese oppression, and united Vietnamese resistance to this was as deep-rooted as their servitude. Resistance to French rule originat-ed as early as the 1880s with the Cao Voung movement and contin-ued to evolve with the formation of the Reform movement in 1904. The 1911 Xinhai Revolution in China and the victories procured by the Japanese in the Russo-Japanese war diminished belief in Western superiority, furthering a Pan-Asian pride and solidifying Vietnam’s de-sire to form a democratic republic,

which took the form of the Vietnam Restoration League, established in 1912. Likewise communism in Vietnam had been present long before either Indochina war, since the establishment of the Vietnam-ese Revolutionary Youth League in 1925 and the Communist Party in 1930. Japanese victories against Allied forces up until 1942 and the bestowal of independence on Bur-ma and the Philippines in 1943 left a powerful legacy in Vietnam, with the Japanese occupation between 1941-45 diminishing the belief in inherent Western superiority. The Viet Minh, who espoused both communist and nationalist ideas, were hugely popular, having com-batted famine in World War Two. In 1945 they were in control of Hanoi, Hue and Saigon, the coun-try was united under communism. Their continual struggle against the French from 1946-54 only strength-ened their role in forming a unified Vietnamese national identity - even President Eisenhower recognised that only the Communists held popular legitimacy and that in a fair election Ho Chi Minh would win.

Indeed, in many ways it was im-possible for capitalist forces to re-main popular within Vietnam. The introduction of a capitalist econ-omy in the 1860s by the French had destroyed many of the protec-tive conventions for peasantry and meant that local landowners were able to ignore their demands. This led to increased seizure of commu-nal lands and forced many small landholders into dependent tenan-cy and huge debt. The Vietnamese rural economy was naturally a col-lectivist one and was ill-suited to capitalism. French imperialism led to intense hardship for the Viet-namese, strengthening popular dis-like of the capitalist economy, with

tax revenues rising from 5.7 pisters in 1914 to 15.7 million in 1939. The effects of this capitalist imposed hardship are evident; in 1930 there was a large-scale protest against tax and land policy in Nghe An, with over 6,000 peasants marching. This can largely be held responsible for the growth of a South-based insur-gency, with around the Viet Cong numbering around 245,000 in 1967, compared with 55,000 in the North Vietnamese Army.

Ultimately the Vietnam War proved disastrous because it was a war that should never have begun. In 1945 the country was united under a sin-gular, albeit communist, leadership. Yet, this never posed the threat that the US thought it did, this was not “centrally directed” Communist expansionism, as the US saw so fit to describe not only the spread of communism in Vietnam, but also in the rest of East Asia. Indeed, North Vietnam was far more na-tionalist than it was communist, it had popular support and was able to dedicate itself far more fully to the war than the less legitimate Government of South Vietnam. Al-though North Vietnam would even-tually win the war, capturing the Southern capital of Saigon in 1975, this was a war that nobody won. A hugely costly and unnecessary war, that fractured a nation and has tak-en many decades to reconcile - the Vietnam War ultimately represents one of the clearest cases of Ameri-can imperial ambitions.

Darkened Uplands FEBRUARY 2016 | veramag.co.uk | 55


An analysis of the oil and mining industries and the manner in which the extractive na-ture of these multi-national corporations mirrors the functioning of colonial states.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

By Joshua Alston

For the past 500 years one of the key forces shaping the devel-opment of the modern world was the desire to gain control of miner-als. From the seventeenth centu-ry Gold prospectors hunting for El Dorado to the activities of the Rho-des corporation in Southern Africa, the search for minerals has always had a darker side. The extractive industries are built on the back of exploitation of its workers and from the destruction of the environ-ments in the area of the mine. The giants of the industry from Glen-core to Shell, like the mineral com-panies of old, have built their suc-cess on the back of a disrespect for human rights. The development of extractive industries in many cases has brought success to the few, the

ruling classes and a narrow clique of owners, at the expense of the majority of the population, who are left with compromised land, pollut-ed water and a spiralling cancer rate. The pattern of extractive in-dustries reproducing inequality has been replicated on a national scale, as companies based in North Amer-ica and Western Europe are able to extract the majority of the profit from the relationship. The actions of modern day extractive industries mirrors the development of colo-nialism, bringing authoritarian de-velopment which is to the benefit of corporations and of elites rather than the population at risk. When it comes to minerals it is clear that all that glisters is not gold.

Sacrifice Zones, Violence and Homeland

Throughout history extractive in-dustries leave a trail of waste and pollutants, created as a bi-product of the process of extraction. This waste will often be passed on to communities as part of the cost of doing business. Often these will be communities which are already separated from the state, through class or ethnic identity, and there-fore less able to resist the will of the state and the company. The ac-tivities of the extractive industries tend to function in conjunction with a wider aim by the state to re-

press the identities of the groups living in the land and in particular their sense of homeland. The ac-tion of these extractive industries is essentially coercive, with violence a common feature of their practice, particular when faced with pro-tests focusing on the negative side effects. For many people the arrival of extractive industries will not be seen as bringing valuable ‘devel-opment’, as a source of jobs and employment, but as a force bring-ing violence to their communities and polluting their water. These examples are largely taken from the impact of the development of extractive industries on First Nation people in Canada, people living in the Niger Delta and people living around the Tintaya mine in Peru.

These companies share a disre-spect for local knowledge and at-tachment to homeland with colo-nial powers. In Canada, tar sands companies illegally dumped waste from tar sands on what is said to be an ancestral burial site. In areas where there is such a close, almost religious connection with the land, the pollution of ancestral sites rep-resents a form of religious repres-sion; as the identities of indigenous people are subversive, as they chal-lenge hegemonic discourses sur-rounding treatment of the land and historical memory. As well as dam-aging religious sites the leakage of

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“It is my obligation as a

mother, my obligation to my

ancestors to ensure we have

our rights respected.”

Crystal Lameman

“Oil creates the illusion

of a completely

changed life, life

without work, life

for free. Oil is a

resource that anaes-

thetises thought,

blurs vision, corrupts.”

Ryszard Kapuściński

pollutants from mines will often leader to high rates of cancer and respiratory diseases, creating con-siderable cultural trauma. Often extractive industries, like colonial powers, would justify their action based upon the fiction of bring-ing development to the backward populations of the sacrifice zones. This development however is not one which holds benefits for local people. Any jobs available to them, whom are most likely to be effected by the negative impacts of the ex-ploitation such as the high cancer rate, are likely to be in menial la-bour rather than in skilled or man-agement positions. Instead of en-thusiasm for taking employment in extractive, the pollution created by the mining, will make other forms of employment, such as small ag-riculture or hunting which create dependency on the companies for jobs. The role that land destruction and pollution plays in creating em-ployment for the extractive indus-tries is arguably analogous to the role that the destruction of crops of Black farmers in Southern Africa in order to compel their workers to work for settler farmers. The role that pollution plays in coercion of labour for the extractive industries is in part equivalent to the role that directly perpetrated violence played in colonialism, with the ef-fect of leaving behind traumatised communities.

These companies, when forced, still use violence in order to coerce populations in sacrifice zones. The most prominent example of this, is the conflict between Shell, the Ni-gerian government and the Ogoni people, represented by MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of Ogo-ni People). This is undoubtable one of the most brutal and best docu-mented incidences of companies

working in the extractive industries collaborating with local authorities, to kill and injure those who oppose their presence. MOSOP successful-ly appealed to the United Nations over the violence directed at them as part of Shell’s expansion in their lands. MOSOP was very successful at building links with wider Nige-rian society, becoming part of the CD (Campaign for Democracy), an NGO around which those op-posed to military rule coalesced. The success of MOSOP led to the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and the Ogoni nine by the Nigerian gov-ernment and the wider violence against Ogoni people being treat-ed as a singular and unexplainable incident. In fact, this sort of vio-lence directed against communities faced by the expansion of the fos-sil fuel and mining multi-nationals is part of their modus operandi. Within Nigeria, the Ijaws had very similar experiences to those of the Ogoni, however were less able to gain publicity for their situation. In Peru, two were killed in violent po-lice crackdowns on protests against the high levels of pollution caused by heavy metal contamination in the water supply. Dissident priests were transferred and local politi-cians removed. The relationship between the government and the company is sufficiently close that police were unable to distinguish whether they worked for the gov-ernment or the company. BHP Bil-liton at its Cerrejon mine in Colom-bia, violently evicted pre-existing communities from its site. Rio Tin-to in Papua New Guinea, provided helicopters and machinery to facili-tate a military blockade of the Bou-gainvillian region which cost 10,000 lives. Corporations who work in ex-tractive industries have a pattern of working with the government to organise violence on a massive

Darkened Uplands FEBRUARY 2016 | veramag.co.uk | 59

scale, perpetrated against people working within the sacrifice zones, who are already suffering from the worst effects of mine related pollu-tion and water contamination.

The actions of the mining and fossil fuel industries, towards the commu-nities who live around their mines and provide focus for the resist-ance to their activities, rely on vio-lence for control. This would either be delivered indirectly through the passing on of the environmental degradation as a result of mining on to communities in the vicinity, or literally through the organisation of violence against protestors and sub-versive groups within the sacrifice zones.

Corruption, Wealth andInequality

The extractive industries play a key role in shaping the policies of na-tional governments, and the eco-nomic relationships between the elites and the general populace. The focus of this is the ability that the oil industry has to enrich local elites, either through corruption or the promotion of inequality. Often the local elites will use the greater revenue created by the function-ing of extractive industries in order to purchase arms in order to pro-mote their military or paramilitary faction. In terms of the creation of dependency and the enrichment of narrow elite class in countries with states dependent on the mil-itary or in civil war. The limiting of the gain from resource extraction to tiny cliques of leaders and external companies based largely in Western Europe, Australia or North America is an echo of the colonial pact be-tween the indigenous leaders, or those appointed by the imperial power as ‘tribal’ chiefs, who were

empowered by the colonial system and imperial powers, who were able to receive resources. The key role of the extractive industries within na-tional and global systems is the re-production of inequalities of wealth and power.

As anyone who follows Premier League football or has ever received an email from a Nigerian prince claiming to be a distant family mem-ber will be aware, the oil industry has a reputation for making people very rich. As is evident from the ear-lier discussion of the effects of the fossil fuel and mining in the com-munities in the sacrifice zones this wealth is often not passed on to the communities near the sites of ex-traction. During the 1970s, Nigeria underwent a boom in oil produc-tion, at a time of rapidly rising fuel prices. The revenue of the Nigerian national government nearly doubled and the petroleum industry rose to represent 45% of the revenue of the Nigerian government. This should have produced a multiplier effect which would have triggered growth in all sectors of the economy, a rise in business takings as the oil money was spent. This has not occurred. One of the primary reasons for this is the tendency of mineral wealth to concentrate, thus reducing the po-tential for the creation of mass de-mand. The concentration of wealth comes in two poles. One is the con-centration of wealth among the oil companies and the higher levels of their agents. This wealth will of-ten be exported offshore, to bank accounts in Switzerland and com-panies based in the UK, Holland or the USA. The second pole of wealth concentration is in the Nigerian government and elites, who were able to use their ability to distribute land, use coercive force and tax as a way of enriching themselves and

their allies. Often this wealth will be achieved through corruption on a massive scale. The ability of Nige-rian elites and oil companies to use resources to produce wealth, cre-ates a ruling class is in effect part of the oil industry, and prepared to serve its interests and an oil indus-try which is served by the political class. The Nigerian political system relies disproportionately on military compulsion for power (there have been 6 military coups since inde-pendence). Within this system there is little pressure to redistribute the oil wealth and to use it as a motor for the economy. In Nigeria the ex-tractive industries serve to enrich a tiny governing class and internation-ally based companies without signif-icantly effecting the development of other economic sectors.

While the Nigerian experience of the role that the oil industry plays in concentrating wealth at the hands of elites has features that are pecu-liar to the Nigerian context, many of the same features are reproduced in other mineral dependent econo-mies. Saudi Arabia experience varies due to the status of Saudi Aramco as a para-statal company, however it shares with Nigerian the existence of a super-rich oil funded elite class, which also has little interest in shar-ing its considerable wealth with the majority of the population. This pat-tern can also be seen with the ac-tions of companies such as BP and Total operating in Azerbaijan, where three of the President’s children have amassed property portfolios

“Corruption is killing children

in Angola.”Nickolas Kristof

60 | veramag.co.uk | FEBRUARY 2016 Darkened Uplands


of close to $100m. It is difficult to measure their other wealth as they often operate as secret sharehold-ers. Angola, Africa’s second largest producer of oil and a large produc-er of diamonds, has also suffered from civil wars funded by illegal diamonds mined on behalf of De Beers Diamond corporation, in di-rect contravention of United Na-tions policies. The role played by extractive industries in the funding of military dictatorships or civil wars in another pattern in the role that commonly arises in the functioning of extractive industries. South Su-dan, another of Africa’s biggest oil producing countries is ranked 171 out of 175 countries by Transpar-ency International in its perception of corruption index, with the oil in-dustry being identified as particu-larly problematic. Like in Angola, in South Sudan much of the revenue from the oil trade has been allo-cated to buying weapons. The cre-ation of an elite class who benefit from the activities of extractive in-dustries, and use it in the pursuit of extreme wealth, military power or a combination of the two. The cre-ation of elite local classes who are placed to benefit from the profits from mineral extraction is another continuity between the actions of companies in the extractive indus-tries and the operation of colonial-ism empowering either local allies, aiming to become wealthy quickly, or oppressive state apparatus. It is clear from these examples that the mineral wealth in a country does not necessarily create wealth, and often plays a role in concentrating wealth and power towards a nar-row elite, often those who are in the position to exercise the great-est level of violence.

In general, in the global economy the extractive industries promote

the flow of resources towards de-veloped countries, consolidating wealth in the core. It is this role in the global economy, with poor-er countries as the producers of raw materials for richer western countries which will then use their greater industrial production to sell the resources back to them for a greater profit, that concentrates the wealth within the wealthy por-tion of the global economy. This is because the recipient of resourc-es, rather than using them to fuel the development of local industries tend to export wealth. The dy-namic of the production of prima-ry goods such as minerals leaves richer countries dependent on in-dustrial or service sectors of their economy adding the most value to products where the base materials are the minerals exported from the primary producing countries. This dependence of the exporting coun-tries on industrialised countries as a source of demand creates a pow-er dynamic between these coun-tries which enables greater control, often used to manufacture con-cessions in mining The depend-ence of mineral producing coun-tries on primary resources makes them vulnerable to variations in the commodity market and places the economy on an unstable foot-ing. This perpetuates the inequali-ty between different countries and the concentration of wealth within core western countries.

Good Extraction?

This essay is full of examples of re-source extraction which has gone wrong, which has not benefitted the society and has been used as a driver for inequality. In a wider sense it is obvious that without gold to make phones, or fossil fuels to run factories, the global econo-

my would not function in remote-ly the same way. There are clearly examples of times when extraction has not had the negative effects identified in Nigeria and Canada and many other mineral produc-ing countries. The stand out ex-ample of this is Norway, which has used its oil wealth to produce the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, investing in education and producing one of the world’s best developed welfare state. In Vene-zuela, during its oil boom the liter-acy rate increased to 95%. What is clear in these two examples is the role that nationalised companies played in ensuring that the benefits of extraction were not passed off abroad, to foreign companies.

Nationalisation represents only one of many alternative methods of production. The continued utility of fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel companies is being questioned, by groups at the frontline, such as in-digenous groups in Canada, and by groups, focussing on the challenge posed by climate change, such as Reclaim the Power or People and Planet. Climate change has drawn increasing attention to wider cri-tiques of extraction as a form of imperialism and as a promoter of equality. Ideas such as the promo-tion of community owned energy, at the moment mainly practiced in the form of solar power coop-eratives and the view of natural resources as part of a public com-mons, can provided a model of the production which benefits society and gives communities the control of extraction which effects.

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From the very beginning, American influence has shaped the course of Liberian history. With the Cold War came the opportunity to counter communism in Africa, but this was to spark two civil wars, a period of conflict lasting over 25 years.

LONE STAR STATE

By Arthur Scott-Geddes

During the early nineteenth century the American Coloniza-tion Society relocated freed slaves to West Africa. Though the move-ment to resettle was initiated by prominent slave owners and pol-iticians who believed that freed slaves would destabilise southern slave populations, some abolition-ists did come to support the relo-cation. The American colonial mis-sion operated on the unwavering belief in a total and unresolvable racial incompatibility. The subse-quent declaration of independence that followed in 1847 resulted in a state based around the total be-lief in Western cultural superiority. This belief today persists in a dif-ferent form; the common Liberian perception of America is one that comes close to idolisation, and it is a perception that is in no way recip-rocated.

Over a century, incipient racial in-tolerance mutated into ethnic con-flict on the Pepper Coast, leading to some of the most horrific violence in African history. With American financial backing, as well as the alleged involvement of the CIA, Samuel Doe’s brutal coup was suc-cessful. It concluded with the pub-lic execution by firing squad of all but four members of William Tol-bert’s government. Tolbert himself was murdered while he slept, and the Americo-Liberian grip on pow-

er, which had been sustained since the very first freed slaves arrived in Liberia, was broken. The relative stability of Americo-Liberian politi-cal domination gave way to violent upheaval.

Samuel Doe’s junta pursued power with brutality and was fraught with illegitimacy; the 1985 election, in the eyes of many foreign observ-ers, was stolen. As well as having over fifty of his opponents put to death, it has been suggested that Doe altered his date of birth in or-der to meet the minimum age re-quirement for Liberian presidents. America’s interest in Liberia is eas-ily understood in a Cold War con-text. The success of Samuel Doe’s initial coup cancelled out the ties with the Soviet Union formed by his predecessor, thereby helping to combat the spread of Communist movements in Africa. In addition, it has also been argued that the US sought to counter radical pan-Afri-canism, which it considered a fur-ther destabilising influence in the region.

The reappearance of Charles Taylor plunged Liberia into its first civil war, and yet here too, American involve-ment is clear. Samuel Doe, the first Liberian president to be born in Li-beria, met an even more appalling end than the president he ousted. This end, and the end of US support

for Doe, was signalled by the deci-sion to stop supplying arms to the government in 1999. He was cap-tured and tortured on film, his cap-tor, Prince Johnson, a warlord allied to Taylor, can be seen drinking Bud-weiser while Doe’s ears are cut off. A symbol of the brutality and injus-tice that has permeated the recent history of Liberia, Prince Johnson is today the Senior Senator for Nimba County, Liberia. Fighting in the First Liberian Civil War lasted for 8 years and saw ethnic Krahn, allied to the Doe regime, fight against Gio and Mano. 200,000 lost their lives and two million were displaced. Atroci-ties and war crimes were rife, rape was weaponised and child soldiers fought for both sides. Over the course of its lengthy re-lationship with Charles Taylor, accusations of close American complicity in the tragedy of Li-beria’s recent past have abound-ed. America’s closeness to Taylor was first suspected after his trial and subsequent conviction at The Hague. Taylor described the direct involvement of the US government in his escape from a maximum se-curity prison in Boston in 1985. Taylor said he had been moved, at night, from the maximum secu-rity area of the prison, to a much less secure area, and after scaling a fence, found what he believed to be a government car waiting

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for him. This story seems plausible in the light of confirmation of his role as an informant to American spies work-ing in Liberia during the 1980s. As a result, the US appears to have directly facilitated Charles Taylor’s insurgency and eventual coup against a corrupt re-gime that was now obsolete due to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the horror of Liberia’s first civil war was exceeded by that of the sec-ond. Again, war crimes were commit-ted on both sides, leading to as many as 300,000 deaths. Recent scholarship has marked the end of the Cold War in 1989 and America’s invasion of Iraq in 1990 as the moment at which Ameri-ca’s interest in Liberia finally dissipated. America’s subsequent policy rapidly be-came one of neutrality, America’s only intervention was to evacuate its own nationals by helicopter. In the course of just a handful of years, American action never materialised to have any of an effect on the tragic events that unfolded. Instead, the events set in motion by America’s Cold War involve-ment in West Africa went unchecked, civil war raged in Liberia until the Unit-ed States had intervened in Iraq for the second time. Jimmy Carter quickly de-plored the racism of America’s refusal to attempt to quell the violence, which Charles Taylor later confirmed it could easily have done.

American influence has been felt strongly throughout Liberian history. The unique mode of its establishment left harsh divisions that would pro-vide the fuel for conflict in the coun-try. However, it was America’s attempt to confront communism in Africa that was the spark for civil war. In this alone, America’s legacy is one of conflict, but its distinct retraction from Liberian politics after the end of the Cold War amounts to an abandonment of the Liberian people, for whose suffering it was largely responsible.

“We concentrate our efforts on Bosnia and

we don’t pay any attention to Liberia, Rwanda and Burun-

di because they’re Af-rican countries [...]

they’re black people and they’re poor

people and we concentrate our

efforts on white peo-ple in Europe [...] this

is a tragedy”Jimmy Carter, 1998

Documents

Empire and Identity